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A review by xterminal
Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women by Jeremy Edwards, Janine Ashbless, Shanna Germain, Delilah Devlin, Louisa Harte, Alana Noël Voth, A.D.R. Forte, Kristina Wright, Andrea Dale, Michelle Augello-Page, Allison Wonderland, Alegra Verde, Justine Elyot, Saskia Walker, Craig Sorensen, Carol Hassler, Charlotte Stein, Aurelia T. Evans
4.0
Kristina Wright (ed.), Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women (Cleis Press, 2010)
What exactly is there to say about a book called Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women that the title doesn't already tell you? Well, I guess that question kind of answers itself, if you've been an Internet user long enough to remember the early, wild-west days of the alt.sex.stories.* family of newsgroups. There's a lot of bad, bad erotica, and porn masquerading as erotica, floating around out there. The job of a good editor is to ensure that what you're getting between the covers of a book, or delivered to your e-reader, weeds out the crap and gives you the quality. I've been a Cleis Press fan since I first found out about them, but Kristina Wright's a new name to me. Would she be as good as the rest of the stable at finding and publishing the highest-quality erotica to be found out there?
Short answer: yep. I should qualify this by saying that I'm already an established fan of the current mythpunk movement (Sonya Taaffe, Jeannelle Ferreira, all those other folks who seem to have centered on Prime Books and have taken Angela Carter and Wendy Walker as demigods/muses), which sparked the current retelling-of-fairy-tales craze, so there wasn't much here I wasn't prepared for vis-a-vis the thematic and structural content; if you're not familiar with that particular subgenre, drop in on a few books of the more mainstream stuff before digging in here. (But not too mainstream, and please for the love of god avoid Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and other such mashups; go for Taaffe's Singing Innocence and Experience and Bill Willingham's Fables series of graphic novels and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and work upwards from there.) You'll have a firmer foundation, if you'll pardon the pun, for such delicacies as Andrea Dale's “How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back” or Louisa Harte's “Ellie and the Shoemaker”, which cleave pretty closely to their historical antecedents. Then it'll be time to branch out into the stories where there's more of a whisper of the original instead of a shout. You know those dishes on Iron Chef America where some hoity-toity chef pipes some smoke under a dome and when you open it, you get that scent, but the actual dish is something entirely different? Yeah, like Carol Hassler's “Gingerbread Man”, my favorite story in the collection.
Do I even need to tell you the sex is sublime? Of course I don't.
Recommended. Get yourself a copy of this pronto. ****
What exactly is there to say about a book called Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women that the title doesn't already tell you? Well, I guess that question kind of answers itself, if you've been an Internet user long enough to remember the early, wild-west days of the alt.sex.stories.* family of newsgroups. There's a lot of bad, bad erotica, and porn masquerading as erotica, floating around out there. The job of a good editor is to ensure that what you're getting between the covers of a book, or delivered to your e-reader, weeds out the crap and gives you the quality. I've been a Cleis Press fan since I first found out about them, but Kristina Wright's a new name to me. Would she be as good as the rest of the stable at finding and publishing the highest-quality erotica to be found out there?
Short answer: yep. I should qualify this by saying that I'm already an established fan of the current mythpunk movement (Sonya Taaffe, Jeannelle Ferreira, all those other folks who seem to have centered on Prime Books and have taken Angela Carter and Wendy Walker as demigods/muses), which sparked the current retelling-of-fairy-tales craze, so there wasn't much here I wasn't prepared for vis-a-vis the thematic and structural content; if you're not familiar with that particular subgenre, drop in on a few books of the more mainstream stuff before digging in here. (But not too mainstream, and please for the love of god avoid Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and other such mashups; go for Taaffe's Singing Innocence and Experience and Bill Willingham's Fables series of graphic novels and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and work upwards from there.) You'll have a firmer foundation, if you'll pardon the pun, for such delicacies as Andrea Dale's “How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back” or Louisa Harte's “Ellie and the Shoemaker”, which cleave pretty closely to their historical antecedents. Then it'll be time to branch out into the stories where there's more of a whisper of the original instead of a shout. You know those dishes on Iron Chef America where some hoity-toity chef pipes some smoke under a dome and when you open it, you get that scent, but the actual dish is something entirely different? Yeah, like Carol Hassler's “Gingerbread Man”, my favorite story in the collection.
Do I even need to tell you the sex is sublime? Of course I don't.
Recommended. Get yourself a copy of this pronto. ****