The fascination with the naughty bits of vampires, witches, succubi and such has haunted man (and woman) kind since the advent of storytelling. Kristina Wright catapults upon our fascination with things that go hump in the night with her collection of 17 lusty and sometimes disquieting tales of sex between humans and their other worldly lovers. Dream Lovers (Cleis Press, 2011) is an erotica lover’s erotica book: literary shorts crafted with bold creativity, impossible to put down until you’ve read every wicked encounter.
“If sexual fantasy is freedom and safety, allowing us to explore within the privacy of our imaginations situations and partners we don’t experience in real life, paranormal fantasy takes such exploration to a whole other level,” Wright states in her introduction. “No longer constrained by something as simple as time, space, or even the necessity of a heartbeat, paranormal loverstake us to places the real world denies us.” In her deft editorial hands, she leads readers on a perfectly haunted joyride.
Wright’s selection spans the gamut from stories that fall along predictable (but well written) lines – a woman who falls in love with her vampire and eventually begs him to turn her for an extended lifetime of vampire passion – to sex with a succubus. The latter story, Succubus Comes Home by Lucy Felthouse manages to give these legendary life suckers some heart and soul, as does Lust as Old as Us, the story of a girl and her vampire and their lifelong love affair.
In Lust, written by Madeline Moore, the would-be partners meet early in life, when the woman named Lisa is young, horny and conflicted. The first time she makes love to her vampire, she doesn’t know about his true nature until after their glow-in-the-dark session. Zack performs the obligatory tricks including showing his fangs to reveal his undead self.
Then I believed. “Oh, my god,” and so on, double takes and gaping.
I covered myself with a sheet.
When I did that, tried to protect myself, his black eyes went dead. “You’re afraid,” he said. “You don’t trust me, even though we just made love.”
“I don’t want to die,” I whispered.
“Stupid Lisa.” He put his clothes on, just like a regular guy—jeans and T-shirt and boots. “I don’t kill people. Life kills people.”
Erotica is an explosive genre finding ardent fans among a growing number of readers. Within that niche, Dream Lover is an excellent example of the combination of creative sex writing that appeals to our inner shriek freaks. Many of the stories have surprise twists that I won’t give away here. Suffice it to say that even formulaic paranormal sex tales can have surprisingly happy endings. For those who abhor horror but crave something off the normal path, this book is a fine collection of erotica that will give you good bumps in a few unmentionable places.
Dream Lovers is published by Cleis Press and edited by Kristina Wright, with the forward by Megan Hart.
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