Death & Sex (but not necessarily in that order)

by Ashley Lister

I saw this week’s topic header and recoiled in horror. No one kills characters in good erotic fiction. Where’s the HEA in a death? Who goes killing sexually active characters? It’s not, I thought indignantly, something I would ever do.

Except, I remember writing a short story called The Good Place for Mitzi Szereto’s anthology Dying For It. It was a story about a guy on death row. His girlfriend had already died in a FUBAR experiment with autoerotic asphyxiation but that didn’t stop her from being an integral part of the story as her ghost came back to haunt him.

“What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

I could hear her voice as clearly as when she used to nibble on my lobe while we were locked in a post-coital embrace. It was that familiar Virginia drawl, deep set with a throaty chuckle of mischief. Death hadn’t killed her sensuous way of speaking, nor had it stifled the effect she had on me. As my erection grew I began to wonder if I was either insane, or mistaken, or still asleep. Unable to stop myself, I spoke her name aloud. “Katy?”

“Do you like being inside?” she breathed.

And, in that moment, I knew it was her. I didn’t know how she was talking to me. I didn’t know why she was talking to me. But I knew my own imagination could never have supplied such a perfect Katy-esque innuendo. With that one question I was beyond being skeptical that the voice was the product of my own diminishing faculties. I knew that Katy was back by my side.

“I’ve missed you, lummock,” she confided.

“I’ve missed you too,” I admitted.

Her words were a balm, soothing and massaging away the tension I had suffered since incarceration. She hadn’t said anything overtly sexual, yet already she had excited me to the point of full arousal. An appreciation of my responses told me that it would only take another couple of sentences and she would have me ejaculating like some over-excited schoolboy on his first real date.

I closed my eyes and easily pictured the way she had looked when she was speaking. The fullness of her lips was easy to recall, the sensuous pout of her mouth was invariably glossed each time she trailed the tip of her tongue across her Cupid’s bow. When she had used her tongue on my length I always remembered the thrill of pleasure that came from hearing her words and feeling them reverberate through my shaft. On this occasion, when she first spoke to me from beyond the grave, the pleasure was every bit as intense as it had been during those fondly recollected times.

“I’ve come to help with your release,” she giggled.

It was another of her double entendres and hearing that sly humor made me simultaneously excited, relieved and delighted that she was back in my life. I had missed her and I had quietly mourned her passing. But the pressing demands of death row and impending execution had urged my focus to slip away from such important things. “How can you help?” I asked. I wasn’t doubting her ability: I was simply curious to know. “My lawyers are qualified and alive,” I pointed out. “At the moment, you’re neither.”

OK, I conceded. I’ve done it once. But publishers don’t like dead characters.
And I was convinced it was the only time I’d ever done it. Until I started thinking about vampire stories.

Should vampires be classed as dead characters? It’s conceded that they’re not alive. And it’s not unreasonable to argue that, if a character isn’t alive they can be classed as dead. But vampires get to inhabit a grey area between those binary opposites with the label undead.

Consequently, if vampires are categorised as dead characters – then I suppose I’ve written about quite a few of those. However, I’m not sure if that means I’ve technically killed those characters.

With each of the characters who were vampires at the beginning of a story I can honestly hold my hand up and say, “That one was dead when I got here.” But, with those characters who became vampires through the development of a novel, I have to admit responsibility. The only thing I can say in my defence is, “Yes, I killed those characters. But they had fun on the way out.” Even the ones that were just between-meal-snacks for the vampires seemed to get something out of the process, as illustrated by this passage from the opening to The BloodLust Chronicles: Faith.

The outburst left a stunned silence in the lair.

Lilah glanced from the gypsy to her brother, wishing she could control his inevitable reaction and knowing she would be powerless to intervene.

Furiously he launched himself from his throne. He grabbed the girl from the centre of the circle and dragged her all the way to the wall of the lair. Pinning her against the crumbling masonry, clutching one breast with a huge hand and tugging her head to one side with the other, he exposed her neck and pressed his mouth over the frantic beat of her pulse.

‘Sire!’ Lilah called. ‘Our laws!’

‘Fuck the laws,’ he said, placing his teeth over the girl’s neck. The pounding of her veins trembled against his lips. He glanced down and noticed her nipples now stood more rigid than ever. The tops of her thighs glistened wetly and he knew she was as close to the point of orgasm as he was. Her breathing came in short gasps and he could hear her heartbeat pounding madly. The knowledge that they would briefly share the same surge of pleasure was disturbingly warming.

‘You can’t feast on her, darling brother,’ Lilah gasped. ‘You know you can’t.’

The dark one pressed his mouth around the gypsy’s neck and drank. The fading sounds of her heartbeat intermingled with his greedy slurping as he swallowed. She beat her fists against him but she was overpowered to begin with and, as her life ebbed away, her protests weakened to an ineffectual caress before fading to nothing. As soon as she was drained the dark one allowed her to fall to the floor. He wiped his mouth dry with the back of his hand and his smile dripped tears of scarlet. Turning to his sister he said, ‘Were you telling me I couldn’t drink from this one? Were you telling me our laws forbid me feeding from gypsies?’ His cheeks were flushed from the feasting and his lips glistened with a succulent red glaze. ‘I’ve got a question for you, little sister: who’s going to stop me?’

Which is my longwinded way of saying I’m a literary murderer. I’ve killed characters. And I’ve clearly done it with such a lack of conscience that I would struggle to remember the names of all those who have been slain by my lethal imagination.

How do I feel about killing my darlings? Being honest, I have no guilt. In The Good Place, Katy needed to be dead for the story to make sense. The trickiest part was writing an erotic story where a central character’s death would be acceptable to the commissioning editor. Although the traditional taboos in erotic fiction are no animals, underage or non-consensual sex, it’s also strongly advised to keep all characters alive throughout the sex scenes.

This introspection is making me feel like I’m some dangerous sort of literary sociopath. I have no remorse in killing characters and my only concern is whether the death can be achieved to a standard that works for the story and will be acceptable for an editor.

Or maybe that’s what being a writer is all about?