Phaze, $2.00, ISBN 1-59426-543-7
Fantasy Erotica, 2005
Sea Lover is a spectacularly unoriginal erotic fantasy in terms of plot, love scene mechanics, conflict, and characters.
Simply put, this is the story of our heroine Leanna going to sea and finding a handsome hunk who turns out to be a merman. She turns out to be a mermaid too and after some predictable “I ran away from him after the best sex of my life!” drama, realizes that all she needs to do to be happy is to free herself and run straight into the ocean, where she will grow tails and pray every day not to be caught in some tuna fisherman’s net.
One person’s idea of eroticism is another person’s idea of a hilarious cartoon, and here, I am already having visions of magically animated tuna sandwiches coupling on the kitchen table while the bottle of Thousand Island dressing hop about and sing Under the Sea. While this premise of underwater sex with merfolks could have been erotic, Anna Fallon unfortunately writes in a bipolar manner.
While Leanna first meets the hero Noah at Mermaid Point (I shudder to imagine who she would end up with if she waits for her perfect lover to show up at Whale Point), he is like a Cassie Edwards hero dripping gooey sardine-smelling cheese from his gills, saying drippy nonsense like, “You told me, Leana, just now, standing here showing off your perfect body. I have to fulfill your wish for you. I have to have you.” (Memo to self: never turn my back to the pile of fish the next time I visit the fish market.) And then, later, Noah turns into a thirteen-year pimply virginal boy pretending to be a hot stud while conducting cybersex over AOL with some supposedly hot fifteen-year old girl at the other side, with charming gems dripping from his mouth like, “Good, now suck my dick!” The author believes that Noah is talking dirty in a sexy way but here I am laughing at how insipid Noah on the whole comes off as. He reminds me of Woody Allen pretending to be Mick Jagger on a fundamental level.
A good erotica, romantic or not, should come off like a work meant for adults, written by an adult who is very perceptive to the nuances of our sexuality and knows how to set off our hot buttons. Sea Lover, however, comes off like the work of someone who mistakes juvenile dirty talk for sexy bedroom banter and overwrought purplish lurid prose for romantic poetry. I don’t find it even a little sexy, only insipid. The main characters perform all kinds of mechanical motions when it comes to sex, but the emotional connection with the reader is missing.
