Sometimes you have to cleanse the brain palate, I swear.

Particular to erotica, I tend to read things, because I think I should. The book is a best-seller, and I need to dissect why. Another book is the prime example in some un-explored subgenre, and I need to educate myself.  Some other book is the best read by a significant author I haven’t hit up yet… and I need to analyze the voice.

You see the pattern there, right?

I don’t so much read these books, as I turn them into science projects.

It’s not really fun.  It’s work.

So, a plus side to my little bouts of, “Whatevah, I read what I want!” is that I can build up a little backlog of erotica that  I actually want to read.

You know… for fun. Instead of out of a sense of obligation.

What I’m looking forward to:

Waking Kiss, by Annabel Joseph

BDSM and ballerinas. Fun. Also, I know that Joseph is a huge ballet nerd.  I love it when people get their own personal nerd on.

It Stings so Sweet by Stephanie Draven

I read the first chapter of this on Tuesday, and it’s easily the strongest intro I’ve read in ages.  The set up has me intrigued. Bonus? It’s a historical. I’m a sucker for historicals.

The Devil of Whiskey Row by Renee Rose

I also have a terrible weakness for Westerns.  Which, I suppose, actually is just part of the weakness for historicals. This one is full of saloons and spanking!

Still by Ann Mayburn

Femme domme with Marine. I just have to see how this one works. Curiosity killed the cat and all. Several people on Goodreads claimed they hate the whole male sub thing, but this book was their special exception to the rule.

The Prince by Tiffany Reisz

I’ve been slow reading these, but I figure it will eventually keep me out of some sort of Song of Fire and Ice-style reader limbo.

There are also some newbie writers that are thiiiiiiiis close to releasing things.  I’ll have to do another entry like this in a few months.

Anyone read anything amazing recently? Let me know!

It’s a delicate balance–the book needs to stand out, but not too much. It needs to imply a tone and entice the reader, but everyone’s tastes are different.

I’ve noticed several different trends.

The “I HAVE PIRATED PHOTOSHOP AND ACQUIRED A TEENER OF METH, WHEEEEE!” Cover

You can tell that someone gave the artist a blurb and let them run wild and free through the artistic meadows.  ”It’s got threesomes, and it’s set in space, huh? Let me see what I can do.” I’d like to think this is all freebie work from someone’s wayward cousin, but actual “publishing companies” produce these things, too.

The Totally Phoned-in Porn Cover

Do I need to explain this one?

I can’t believe what people get away with on Amazon, sometimes.

The Fifty Shades of Gray Rip-off

There are a bunch of these. Many include masks and/or ribbons, and another big chunk are shoes.  If the designer is feeling particularly daring, it’ll be some mildly off-putting object.  If it’s really, really full of “BDSM,” and someone has to call someone else ‘Sir’ or there’s light spanking, there might be cuffs or something.

But, usually not.  It’s not in the “tee hee hee” spirit of the thing.

The “Body Parts Imply Sex” Cover

A huge, huge number of these types of covers feature lonely, beheaded male torsos, which is both awesome and kind of creepy.

Some readers are only in it for the ripped pecs, people. The Female Gaze lives on.

There’s another sizable percentage of female legs in heels or the top half of a woman’s blindfolded face.

The “Hot People Have Better Sex” Cover

This is easily the most popular format for “erotic romance” covers.  Models + color wash + gradiant fades = “hot.” I assume they sell well.

The fun thing there is that the heroines of these books are almost universally described “girl next door” types.

Business on the top, party on the bottom, aka The Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde Cover

These are, for the most part, “erotic suspense” books.

I don’t know why the horn picture exists, but you can’t expect me to not use it in a post. I’m only human.

Sometimes it’s the guy on the top, the woman on the bottom. Sometimes it’s a cityscape on top, and a couple of the bottom. In general, you know that there’s probably going to be a chase scene and maybe some hacking.

Did I miss any?

I enjoy a good cowboy story, usually.

Thomas is best-known for the book Comfort Food, which I haven’t yet read, because I’m thinking it might not be my cup of tea.

Her work is not “erotic romance”. Often on some level it is about love and/or obsession. Often the couple in some way ends up “together”, but the work should not be expected to follow the conventions of any type of genre romance, erotic or otherwise. If you are looking for genre romance (erotic or otherwise), please read a different author. Erotic romance is “more explicit romance”. This is something different.

Oddly, it’s not set in Montana. I have a feeling that’s not the last thing about it that’s going to throw me.

So far as I can tell, the internet can’t decide what “Dark Erotica” actually means.

Wikipedia lists it as a horror sub-genre, which would stick all those vampire books in the same category.

Goodreads has a dedicated group that says it’s about “storylines with rough sex, forced seduction, rape, kidnapping, BDSM, and those who enjoy alternative lifestyles to the extreme, multiple partners that may or may not involve same sex interaction.”

Amazon reviews suggest that it’s any piece of erotica without a happy ending, even though you find books with “happy endings” described as “dark,” too. Anneke Jacob’s As She’s Told absolutely qualifies as “dark,” but it has a happy ending. Kind of.

The “shelves” over at Goodreads tell the same story.  People are listing 50 Shades as “dark.”  Go fig.

Goodreads lists the current queen of “dark erotica” as CJ Roberts.  She’s written a series called The Dark Duet (which, really? How had no one come up with that yet? That’s an awesome series name.)

This is the first book:

Captive in the Dark

Now, that is a dark erotica cover.  According to the synopsis, it’s full of all sorts of “very disturbing situations, dubious consent, strong language, and graphic violence.”  The plot sounds like that movie where Jet Li was stuck in a collar. Actually, the whole “dark erotica” genre bears a strong resemblance to a particular subset of arty Asian horror films.  These are plots that would work for Miike, Chan-wook, or Sono. (I’m a gigantic horror movie nerd. It’s unladylike. So sue me.)

Horror books are being marketed as erotic fiction for women.  Really.

Look at the pretty girl in the prettily scripted Big Sky cover. She’s about to be kidnapped, and bad things are going to happen to her. Really.

Consciously or not, there’s a clear and short road to ‘sex = death’ and ‘love = obliteration’ territory in the female fiction landscape.

It’s interesting to me where the line between “subversive” fiction and “omg, dirty dark sex books for laydeez” ends up being drawn.

Skye Warren’s “Keep Me Safe” (She’s got the best layout on her website.)

I have no idea why books that have horror plots get classified as erotica, dark or otherwise, so long as a feminine pen name and pretty cover is provided. Presumably, if a man were (out and proud) writing these things, he’d end up with the Lars Von Trier “Kicked Out of Cannes” Award, or something. He’d be Eli Roth.  He’d be a pig.  A misogynist.

Maybe it’s that it isn’t perceived as new and unusual material for male minds to “explore.”  Out of a man, it’s not marketable as sexy. It’s horror. It may be erotic in execution, but you’re not encouraged to say that out loud.  Identifying it as sexy makes you a deviant.  It’s not framed with a pretty script font and declared intellectually subversive.  Maybe, maybe it’s the stuff of revenge fantasy.  Or, in the case of John Ringo, a little ridiculous. Or, it’s just plain scary.

But feminize the same content, and it’s somehow more compelling. It’s allowed to be openly erotic.  The sinister “sadistic” morphs into eroticized “sadism.”

Kink.com has done something similar, recently, with two gang rape “fantasy” series that feature rough sex, forced seduction, rape, kidnapping, and BDSM. Female director. Supposedly female narratives.  So long as it springs forth from a woman’s mind, it’s still somehow safe.  It’s consensual non-consent. It’s fantasy.

It’s allowed to be hot.

Horror, smut, and crime novels have been linked like this before.

One of my very favorite under-appreciated authors, Andersen Prunty, writes books that are full of dubious content and dubious sex, but he’s most often labeled ”bizarro,” part of the “new pulp.” (And, “new pulp” is overwhelmingly marketed as masculine.) Now, I have no idea why “new pulp” doesn’t include sleaze titles, because the “old pulp” was full of soft core smut books with the best covers in the history of publishing. Smut books used to be for men. But, you don’t see those in the so-called pulp revival.

The assumption seems to be that “men are visual creatures,” so they should stick to video porn. Masculine erotica is dead.

These days, even the m/m gay erotica is written by and marketed to women.

Two bucks says there’s “dark” slash erotica.

But, I’m not going to go looking for it.

Pietro Aretino (20 April 1492 – 21 October 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics and invented modern literate pornography.

First portrait by Titian, 1512. He would fit in an episode of Portlandia.

Aretino prospered, living from hand to mouth as a hanger-on in the literate circle of his patron, sharpening his satirical talents on the gossip of politics and the Papal Curia, and turning the coarse Roman pasquinade into a rapier weapon of satire, until his sixteen ribald Sonetti Lussuriosi (Lust Sonnets) written to accompany Giulio Romano’s exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series of drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title I Modi finally caused such outrage that he had to temporarily flee Rome. In 2007, Michael Nyman set eight of the poems to music. They proved no less controversial: at a 2008 performance at Cadogan Hall, the programs were withdrawn on allegations of obscenity.

Livejournal’s Weepingcock community has some translations.

“Cradled the General’s songster in the palm of his hand and began stroking its back, as one stroke the back of a cat”

“Placing his paintbrush, which he first moistened with spit, into her tiny color cup, he made her twist and turn as women do in the birth throes or in the mother’s malady. And to be doubly sure that his nail would be driven more tightly into her slit, he motioned to his back and his favorite punk pulled his breeches down to his heels and applied his clyster to the reverend’s visiblium”

“Were now pounding the sauce in the mortar”

“Filled the glass tool”

“I was more worn out than pawns are frayed by usury, and began rubbing my dear little monkey with my hand like cats in Jaunary rub their backsides on a roof”

“Speak plainly and say fuck, prick, cunt, and ass if you want anyone except for the scholars at the Sapienza Capranica to understand you. You with your rope in the ring, your obelisk in the Colosseum, your leek in the garden, your key in the lock, your bolt in the door, your pestle in the mortar, your nightingale in the nest, your tree in the ditch, syringe in the flap-valve, your sword in the scabbeard, not to mention your stake, your crozier, your parsnip, your little monkey, your this, your that, your him and your her, your apples, leaves of the missle, fact, verbigriata, job, affair, big news, handles, arrow, carrot, root, and all shit there is”

This is mostly because I spent a lot of time looking at the blogs and websites of erotica authors.

And, they’re all strikingly porn free.

Most of them?  Were trying to pass as romance novelists.  They don’t write porn.  They write erotic romance.

Or, maybe they were just attempting to be safe for work.

This isn't safe for work. But, still--doesn't qualify as porn, does it?

I don’t really know.

I just know I don’t have much interest in writing erotic romance.  That’s what I did with my summer vacation.  I read a ton of “erotica.”

Most of it?  Is “romance” oriented.  That means that you’ve got two (or three) people (or werewolves, vampires, or aliens) that not only have floridly described Hottest Sex Ever–they fuck like no one has ever fucked before, because they’re meant to be.  They’re soulmates.  It’s an emotional connection that cannot be denied.  It’s the twuest of twue love.

This is doubly so if there are BDSM elements, because there’s that mythical thing where BDSM is made somehow more acceptable by the notion that the two people in the relationship are more “deeply committed” to each other via floggings and “trust” and, presumably, fucking magic.

The story, I am writing right now?

No magic spankings.

Not that all consensual spankings aren’t a wee magical.  But you know… these people in my head?  They’re not meant to be together forever.  They’re wank bank material.  The teacher in my current story (broke 15k words last night, hello!) is sort of sad.  He’s no one’s soulmate.  He is shallow.  He’s lonely.  And, he’s depressed.  The student that seduces him?  Is gawky and talks too much.

Because perfect just isn’t hot to me.  People are just way more interesting when they’re flawed.  Sex doesn’t have to happen in the context of a fateful eternal romance.

Erotica is aimed at women.

Now, when you go looking for erotica?  The two recommendations that come up over and over and over?  The Marketplace series and the Sleeping Beauty books by Anne Rice.

And, those aren’t books about true love.

It’s weird.  The most successful romance novelist of the last decade is a Mormon that believes in waiting until marriage, writing about dazzling, emotionally abusive stalkers.  And, that is okay.  That’s okay for freaking teenagers.

But porn for grown women is seemingly taboo in the larger marketplace.

So, really, I don’t understand this thing.  Is it embarrassment?  If you’re a woman reading about male werepanther threesomes, should shame come into your game at all?

And, seriously, who is buying all the sci-fi m/m/m books?  Blue skin and tails, I tell you.  I think the tails are probably the important part…