Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 1-59998-842-9
Contemporary Paranormal Erotica, 2007
This is sad, I know, but one look at the bare torso in the cover of Tales From Lachmuirghan and I go, “Oh, I recognize those dinner plate nipples everywhere! It’s the same guy on JL Langley’s My Fair Captain!” I blame this sad state of corruption of my soul on Anne Cain. She should know better than to use such guys on her covers to lure susceptible readers to the dark side.
Okay, back to this collection of short stories, I am given to understand that these stories used to be available for free on the now defunct lachmuirghan.com website. The authors involved have revised the stories and these stories are now packaged and available for everyone in this collection. The authors involved in this collection are Madeline Oh, Clarissa Wilmot, Isabo Kelly, Maristella Kent, Xandra King, Pandora Grace, and MA duBarry.
Lachmuirghan is this wonderful place where, judging from the stories, you go to get shagged senseless and wonderfully by the locals who are apparently incomparable when it comes to sex. And they don’t even charge money for their services rendered, which makes this place better than, I don’t know, “70% discount and buy three to get four free” day at Samhain Publishing, provided one doesn’t mind that the locals in question may not be completely human at times. Like that guy mentioned in Clarissa Wilmot’s Over the Sea to Skye who can turn into a horse. I know. Sometimes the jokes write themselves.
The stories here however are very, very short and they comprise sexual encounters with minimal to adequate set-up leading to these scenes. There are all kinds of sexual scenes here but I find that these stories are too short on the whole to be memorable. The stories are fine, I believe, when they are available for free in a conceptual erotic fiction website, but when packaged into an anthology, they kind of lose much of their magic in the transition. The scenery is wonderful here with the authors taking much effort to romanticize the town and its atmosphere, but I’ll be hard-pressed to remember the stories in this collection once I’m done with it.
