Hot Off the Press, Part 1

by Jean Roberta

For the past few weeks, I’ve done more reading than writing. I’ve plowed through six recent books, and started reading a seventh.

Steve Berman of Lethe Press often sends me gifts through the mail: uncorrected advance proofs of Lethe books that aren’t available to the public yet. He doesn’t ask me to review them, but the request seems to be implied.

The latest batch consists of:

1) Forget the Sleepless Shores, a collection of stories by classics scholar and poet Sonya Taaffe (from New England).
2) Does It Show? A novel in the “Phoenix Court” series by Paul Magrs from northern England.
3) Perennial: A Garden Romance, a slim volume by fiction-writer and cancer-survivor Mary Anne Mohanraj of Chicago.
4) Read by Strangers, a collection of stories by Philip Dean Walker (who lives in Washington, D.C.)

All these books are scheduled to be released in August.

Forget the Sleepless Shores is the one I read first. The title put me off because I thought it looked pretentious, and it has no clear relevance to any of the stories. Another aspect that both charmed and irritated me was the author’s poetic style in fiction. She clearly prefers to “show, not tell,” and is unwilling to “murder her darlings” (clever turns of phrase that don’t advance a plot). There is so much description of water in this collection that I felt as if I had to dry out between stories.

To sum up, I found Sonya Taaffe to be an acquired taste. However, her work rewards perseverance.

Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:

“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”

The viewpoint character, “Vetiver” (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.

Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact.

The author’s literary style is excellent for creating atmosphere, and the stories about the spirit world are effectively spine-tingling, even though most aren’t clearly identifiable as horror stories. (Or at least they have little in common with the work of Stephen King.)

Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.

The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:

“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238.”

The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of twentieth-century Victor Frankenstein:

“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”

All this accurately reflects the life-story of Oppenheimer and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. (I looked him up.)

Space doesn’t allow me to discuss all the stories in the collection, but several others are also brilliant and haunting.

Did I mention water? I was intrigued by “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts,” a story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft. Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016).

Two of us here at the Grip have written very different versions of that same Lovecraft piece. Lisabet posted a spoof, “The Shadow Over Des Moines,” here quite awhile ago.

My version of the story, “Innsmouth Blues” (narrated by an African-American schoolteacher of the 1920s) appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). This anthology was intended to overturn Lovecraft’s prejudices.

Taaffe’s more serious version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a contemporary woman who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the Atlantic. The references to an incomplete genocide, from which the scattered survivors reconstruct a group identity over several generations, echo several historical atrocities.

When the book becomes publicly available next month, I recommend buying a copy.

Stay tuned for my descriptions of the rest of my recent reading-matter. I’ll try to be more concise!

A Sex of Humor

by Kristina Wright

I don't write a lot of comedy into my erotica. I don't know why-- I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky chick-- but for whatever reason, I'm drawn to other emotions when it comes to penning sex scenes. Real life sex can be funny and lighthearted, but I tend to write more about obsession, jealousy and darker things.

I'll have to leave the laugh-out-loud humor to authors like Jeremy Edwards and Allison Wonderland (both of whom do it so, so well), but I combed through my archives and found an old, old story that was comic and erotic and just plain fun to write.

"A Girl's Best Friend" was one of my first pieces of erotica, written back in 2001 and originally appearing in Good Vibrations Magazine. It was later picked up for print publication by Anne Semans for her legendary Many Joys of Sex Toys (2004). In rereading it, I find myself mostly liking the voice I wrote it in and wanting to revisit this character. Maybe one day.

Here's an excerpt of one of my rare attempts at combining sex and humor:

A Girl's Best Friend (excerpt)

            Finding a decent apartment in Manhattan is like trying to find an outfit to match a pair of shoes you bought on sale.  In other words, next to impossible. 

            I was fresh out of college at UT-Austin and had my sights set on the publishing world in New York City.  My friend Kim, who graduated the semester before me, clued me in about an apartment in her building.  It was tiny and old, but in a pretty decent neighborhood with a long, but manageable, walk to my cubicle on 42^nd Street.  I choked back my shock at the cost of rent and plopped down first, last and security out of the nest egg I’d been saving from four years waiting tables.  My parents had offered to help with the rent for the first year or two, but I was determined to do it on my own for as long as I could.  And so, on a hot day in July I moved my books, my clothes and my cat into the cramped third floor apartment henceforth known as Home Sweet Home.

            Living in a big city was nothing like I’d imagined it.  The noise was louder, the bugs were bigger and the people were ruder and freakier.  I loved it.  I was free to be me, or at least the me I’d always imagined.  I was far from small-town life in my hometown of Vicksburg, Texas.  I was also far from my college friends who teased that I would be the only girl in all of New York City who had two names and was still a virgin.

            First things first, Rebecca-Jane is not really two names because it’s hyphenated.  My parents were very forward thinking for Vicksburg.  Secondly, I was a virgin only in the most technical sense.  I’d become well acquainted with my mama’s silver-handled hairbrush at the tender age of... well, let’s just say I finally understood why Barbie was smiling all the time.  And I had my share of groping, drooling, hormone-driven boyfriends.  I had just never felt an overwhelming urge to let some guy between my legs.  When the time was right, I knew the right guy would come along.

            I was hardly home at all my first week in the city.  I’d landed a job at a publishing house, sifting through manuscripts and answering correspondence for not much more money than I’d made waiting tables.  A far cry from my dreams of buying the next Stephen King, but still very exciting for a girl from Vicksburg whose most exciting moment to date was being nominated homecoming princess.  When Kim invited me out to go clubbing on Friday night I begged off because I wanted to stay in and watch a week’s worth of soaps.  I know what you’re thinking, but dang, it was only my first week in the city.  A girl needs a chance to catch her breath!

            I went all out for my first meal in my new place, preparing a feast for one.  It was only a cheap steak and baked potato broiled in on my tiny oven, but it was the best meal I’d ever had because I was in my own apartment.  I was heady with freedom as I sat cross-legged on the sofa with my dinner propped on a pillow.  The sofa had been left by the former tenant.  It was a ratty old thing, worn in several spots and faded in others.  But I covered it with one of the quilts Mama made me bring and it looked, well, if not new at least homey.

            I finished my dinner, put Wednesday’s episode of All My Children on pause, and carried my plate to the little alcove that was my kitchen.  I considered it quite a coup that I actually had a dishwasher.  It was a cumbersome thing that had to be wheeled over to the sink, hoses and cords poking out every which way, but it beat the hell out of washing dishes myself. 

            I opened the dishwasher door and slid out the rack and nearly choked on my tongue.  Apparently, the ratty old sofa wasn’t the only thing the former tenant had bequeathed to me.  I was speechless for a moment, then said the first thing that came to my mind.

            “Fuck!”

            What can I say, a week in the city had already taken its toll on my vocabulary.  Pastor Goodwin would be appalled.

            Staring up at me, or at least that’s the way it appeared, was the largest, thickest, ugliest looking dick I’d ever seen.  I suppose you think that’s not saying much, given that I’d only seen two for real (Jason Ritchie’s in eleventh grade and Eric Linsey’s sophomore year of college— Jason’s was bigger, but Eric’s was more aesthetically appealing).  But I’d spent a summer working at a photo lab off-campus in addition to my waitressing job, and let me tell you, it’s shocking what kinds of pictures people will take.  Big dicks, short dicks, long, skinny, pale and dark, I saw an awful lot of dicks that summer and they all imprinted themselves on my brain for future reference.  And this, this thing staring up at me from the cutlery tray on the bottom rack of my dishwasher was a Texas-sized dick— the biggest, thickest dick I’d ever seen.

            Okay, I know it’s called a dildo, I’m not a complete country bumpkin, but at the moment I saw it, all I could think was “dick.”  It was long and thick, a fleshy-pink color complete with veins and a heavily-ridged little helmet.  It was wedged into one of the squares of the cutlery tray and it stared up at me with its one well-defined eye.  I must have stood there ten minutes, staring down at the monster in my dishwasher.

            “What am I going to do?” I whispered to Miss Marple, my orange and white kitty who was making circles around my legs.  “I can’t leave it in there.”

            Miss Marple let out a plaintive wail of agreement before stalking off to the bathroom.  She knew that’s where the biggest, scariest creatures hung out.  After seeing the contents of my dishwasher, I wasn’t so sure. 

            I took my fork and prodded the thing.  It looked like it was made of jelly, little air bubbles puckered beneath it’s pink surface.  It didn’t feel like jelly, though.  It barely quivered when I poked it, the tines of the fork hardly made a dent in its rubbery surface.  I decided I was too tired to deal with the dildo in my kitchen.  I pushed the rack back into the dishwasher and closed the door.  I washed my plate in the sink, throwing the occasional furtive glances toward the dishwasher as if I expected its rubbery inhabitant to burst out and attack me.  When I was finished, I walked quickly past the dishwasher and shut off the light.  Maybe my new tenant would mysteriously vanish by morning.

            My dreams that night were of previous boyfriends who had pressured me to have sex.  Strangely enough, they all looked like large, pink dildos.  Where was Freud when I needed him most?

            I left the apartment early Saturday to meet Kim for brunch and a day of shopping the second-hand stores.  I felt a twinge of guilt for leaving poor little Miss Marple alone with that enormous dildo, but I figured she was safe so long as it was in the dishwasher.  When Kim asked me how I enjoyed my first dinner in my new apartment, I blushed and changed the subject.

            By the time Kim tossed me out of her apartment, it was 2 a.m. and I was wired on espresso.  I was relieved to see the apartment, and Miss Marple, was as I’d left it.  What had I expected?  Invasion of the Sex Toy Snatcher?  Night of the Living Dildo?  Well, let’s just say after a restless night’s sleep and four hits of espresso, anything seemed possible.  There are a million stories in the naked city, and one of them was living in my dishwasher.