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Subject: {ASSM} {REVIEW} The Annex Reviews, 5/27/00
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 01:10:07 -0400
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The Annex Reviews, 5/27/00
by Lady Cyrrh (ladycyrrh@aol.com)
Website: http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh OR
http://home.aol.com/ladycyrrh



The stories:

Jen's Titillating Behavior (DrSpin): M/F cons, exhib, oral, breast, cheat
Hard Dick High (Kari Alarus): m/f, f/f, teen, high school, humor, 
      femdom
The Secret Lair (Barbara B): F/M/M, cons
The Seduction of a Desert Prince (Killashandra, Rachael Sabotini, 
      elynross): M/M slash, first, Highlander 


Jen's Titillating Behavior [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 3/14/00
Author: DrSpin
Address: drspin@newsguy.com
Website: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/DrSpin/www/

Four suburban couples in their thirties are used to meeting regularly 
for dinner, drinks, and the occasional partaking of weed. At one such 
occasion, when everyone's gotten a bit tipsy, the subject turns to each 
wife's wifely attributes: hair, tits, legs, ass. Jen has the tits. When her 
husband, the narrator of story, turns in for the night, she decides to 
show the other guys just what her demicup contains. The narrator 
feigns sleep as she flashes them from the window, but soon she goes 
downstairs again, and because this behavior is unusual for her, he 
follows. As he watches from outside, he gets more than an eyeful as they 
tease out one of her fantasies:

She bent her head and took him in her mouth, holding him with her 
left hand. I watched bewildered as she applied herself, her head 
bobbing slowly and evenly. This was Jen? My Jen? I mean, we'd done 
this plenty of times but it was by no means her favourite activity. It was 
always something of a gift she made to me, certainly not a wanton act of 
lust on her part...[They] both pumped furiously, their hands over hers. 
Martin pointed his shaft urgently at her breasts and she thrust her 
shoulders back, lifting her breasts forward. His first spurt landed 
directly on her right breast and he clutched himself, jerking, as he 
sprayed her in four or five powerful bursts. Geoff was adding his 
contribution before Martin was finished, sending 
ribbons of semen across her chest.

She fell back suddenly, hands free and weight on her heels, her chest 
area smeared with their sperm. Her head slumped forward and I thought 
she'd lost her balance. It looked as though she been knocked over by the 
primitive force of ejaculation. Then I realized. Both her hands were 
kneading at the crotch of her jeans and she was in the throes of orgasm.

The narrator, naturally, is stunned. Though he chooses not to call his 
wife to case, the dynamics of his marriage have changed forever.

I liked the story a lot; it seemed realistic of the way feckless couples in 
their thirties would entertain themselves in well-ordered suburbia. The 
ending was a letdown however. The happy group breaks up under the 
strain, as if poor Jen had opened a Pandora's box of adultery, with the 
narrator having no regrets about it. This I didn't quite buy. The story 
would have been so much stronger if it had ended right after the 
incident, with the narrator drawing his conclusions and moving on. But 
what came before was pretty damn good, and for that I recommend it.  



Hard Dick High [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 5/13/00
Author: Kari Alarus
Address: head2fat@soon.com
Posted by: <removed at request of poster 2003-02-08>
Poster address: <removed at request of poster 2003-02-08>

How can you resist a story with a title like this?  

Hard Dick High is an imaginary place where the girls dress like sluts 
and cocktease all day long and the boys are kept in perpetual 
frustration. The author truly used his or her imagination in describing 
the sluts ("Buxom Tamara Smith arrived in a top hat, black heels, and a 
nylon see-through body suit.  Unconstrained by any bra, her 
magnificent 38DD knockers were full, firm, and deadly.  The gorgeous 
vixen's sole concession to modesty was a teeny tiny black thong. ") and 
their language ("Whew!  Is it drafty in here or are my holes exposed?  
Perhaps someone's stiff pipe will plug the gaps") though they sound 
suspiciously more like Showgirl rejects than high school girls. The 
young men and the teachers are forbidden to respond to any of this by 
the school's amazon guards, so they walk around with perpetual hard-
ons all day long. But sometimes the sluts just go too far, and for that 
they're sent to the principal, who fucks them silly and spray-coats them 
with cum. After that, things *really* get out of hand, with the sluts 
streaming out into the halls and literally raping any male they 
encounter.

This was more of a porny scenario than a story, and it was very, very 
silly. The author said in the introduction, "Here's some straight up porn 
designed to get your dick hard.  I won't even pretend that there's much 
of literary merit here" yet it was so ridiculous, so crass, and so over the 
top, I just had to give it an A--it was possibly the sluttiest high school 
story I've ever read, and I literally grinned right through it, and even 
broke out into laughter in a few places. I wonder if the author realized 
how humorous it was, or if it was even intended to be humorous. It had 
the overdescriptive, deadly earnest tone a lot of stroke stories have, one 
that usually receives my drubbing. But this time, for some odd reason, 
everything worked.



The Secret Lair [A+]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 4/18/00
Author: Barbara B
Address: babs42ne@hotmail.com

Like the writer of this piece, I'm a big fan of libraries. They're the 
perfect place to people-watch and the quiet lends itself to building 
fantasies about those people, as the narrator of the story does:

I'm about to open the Astronomy magazine when an older man comes in.  
He doesn't even seem to notice me as he takes his book and settles into 
one of the oversized chairs that frame the fireplace.  I watch him as he 
puts on his reading glasses, opens the volume he's brought, and soon is 
deep into the story.  <<Wonder what he's reading?>> I ask myself.  He's 
dressed casually in a white polo shirt that sets off his tan and the 
muscles in his arms, a man who was obviously handsome in his youth 
and doesn't look all that bad now.  <<He probably likes tropical settings,>> 
I decide or how else could he have gotten that tan in the winter.  He's 
very tall and slim.  <<Probably was an athlete, and smart with a good 
sense of humor>> I deduce.  He has most of his very curly hair, which is 
now entirely gray, and except for a very slight, almost imperceptible 
limp, he's in great shape.  About 62 years old is my guess. And as I often 
do when I study someone, I wonder about the women he's made love to, 
the ahhh's and ohhh's he's heard, the pussies he's tasted, the mouths 
he's explored, the breasts he's fondled and suckled.  I wonder if his dick 
still gets hard when he's holding his beloved.  And I wonder when he 
falls asleep at night if he dreams about the ladies who over the years 
have brought him pleasure as he returned the favor.  I wonder how 
many fond memories he's made.

In the course of her visit she fantasizes about another man...and her 
fantasies come to life when he seduces her behind the stacks, and then 
the first man joins in!

This is a type of story I don't review that much, because it's the hardest 
type to do well: the plotless encounter that is steamy, realistic, AND 
written well enough to be unique and entertaining. It took a while to 
get going, and was slightly rough in the beginning, but the sex scenes, 
which were sweet, passionate, and explicit, made up for it. So for that a 
hearty recommendation from me, plus I do like the idea of getting it on 
in a library. It's a secret fantasy I didn't know I'd had.



The Seduction of the Desert Prince [B+]
Authors: Killashandra, Rachael Sabotini, elynross
Available from: Lair of the Krell
Address: http://mediafans.org/krelldom


All right, I admit it. I've got a love/hate relationship with slash. On the 
one hand I like its audacity and its pink-cheeked, crochet-potholder 
endorsement of the kinky, the maudlin, the melodramatic. On the other 
hand, I'm frustrated with its sloppy structure, its repetitive stories, its 
lack of true imagination.

When I came upon this novel-length story I thought "Oh boy!" 
anticipating a juicy M/M sex slavery tale in a Middle Eastern setting, 
with lots of hot sex, angsty emotional confessions, and florid language, 
not to mention D/s and bondage.  Well, I got that, but ...there were 
problems.

This was a Highlander fandom story about Duncan (the slave) and 
Methos (the tribal leader who buys him). It was a whopper -- over 
75,000 words, and yet unfinished. I should say here I don't watch 
Highlander and never have, although I'm familiar with the basic 
premise of it. Logically, a fan of the show could say "That's why you 
didn't get the story, dumbass" but in my defense I'll say I've read slash 
from shows I watch or watched a lot (Star Trek, Gatchaman) shows I 
watch only occasionally (Xena) and shows I never watch (Buffy) and -- 
guess what! What makes me enjoy a story is how well and convincingly 
it is written, not how familiar I am with its predecessor. In other words, 
a fanfic story stands alone as a work of writing, not an extension of a TV 
show. Slash writers often seem to dismiss or make excuses for this truth. 
In fact, they have ready excuses for a lot of authorial shortcomings, 
which they post both on their websites and in various newsgroups. 
Many times they purport to want feedback on stories but tell us in big 
capitals NO FLAMES ALLOWED. Some go as far to say they aren't 
interesting in learning to become better writers (read: communicators) 
at all -- they're just doing it for the fun of it, a handy way of escaping 
the critical glare. So say anything negative about slash fiction, and 
you're bound to offend someone.

That said, the story began well. Duncan, an Immortal good deed-doing 
Scottish warrior, is being sold at a slave auction and Methos, an older, 
more cynical Immortal (the "Desert Prince" of the title), buys him. The 
Highlander TV show is set in the present day with frequent historical 
flashbacks, but this story plays with canon a bit: it is an AU (alternate 
universe) depiction of how these two met sometime in 16th century 
Morocco or Algeria, after the rise of Islam but before the widespread 
dissemination of firearms. I expected, as is common for slash, long, 
detailed descriptions of the two falling in love with each other: the slave 
overcoming his pride and rebelliousness and learning how to be 
properly submissive and love his master, while the master must how to 
see his slave as a human and not a plaything, and open up his heart. 
However, the writers fumbled things by having the slave obviously 
attracted from the get-go:

Movement at the edge of the crowd drew his eye, and the Immortal he'd 
seen drew in close. Hope surged at the thought -- he might not need a 
sword. An Immortal's loyalty lay with other Immortals, perhaps this 
man would buy him merely to keep him out of mortal hands, to keep the 
Immortal secret safe. Duncan could finally make out the fair features 
under the swath of black that covered the man from head to toe. Pale 
skin and well-formed features, lips that drew the eye, framed by a 
narrow beard, and a searing, piercing gaze... he quickly looked away, 
those eyes knowing more than Duncan could even understand, yet he 
could not look away for long. The strength and desire he'd glimpsed 
drew him like a moth to flame, and he shuddered to think of his duties 
should such a man --such an Immortal -- buy him.

Thus punctured the tension a lot, as we already *know* they're going to 
get together without any real problems, right?

Duncan winds up being an oddly narcotized captive. He spends most of 
his time feeling only slightly embarrassed,  as if the authors wanted 
to honeycoat his predicament. In fact he comes across more as a sincere, 
logical, cautiously detached female than a sword-swinging warrior. He 
gets wet a lot (it's precum, but described suspiciously like vaginal 
wetness) and his abdominal muscles clench when he gets aroused and 
his belly burns; he feels all-over tinglings rather than organ centered 
ones. This I don't have problem with; it's a fantasy, and it's slash, and 
many female readers identify with the male sex objects in the stories. 
But in the logic of the story, if he's a warrior, and a proud honorable 
Immortal warrior at that, he should be acting more proudly and 
aggressively, so we know that's who he is. 

Methos, on the other hand, is more of a "man," but even he flubs up; as a 
tribal leader he's supposed to be leading his people through a tense time 
but instead he paces about and moons excessively over his slave, and 
one moment he's distant and the next companionable -- very 
inconsistent. Some of the problems with the romance may have been 
due to the fact the story has three authors (among them Killashandra, 
highly regarded in Trek circles), and it may have been written in a 
round-robin fashion. If so, it's a good job, because the joins were 
seamless, and the proofreading, as usual for slash, is excellent. But the 
effect is still that of the characters being used as puppets moved around 
a game board for the benefit of the writers...which can be seen as a 
parallel process to the act of watching the shows and projecting the 
homosexual relationships into them. There's something both endearing 
and insulting about this; it's like the writers are deliberately playing 
dumb as to what they're *really* writing and fantasizing about. I've 
seen this in a lot of slash, and usually, it's part of the fun; but 75,000 
words of it was just too much. Again, one could say, "Well, who cares, it's 
a sexual fantasy about two straight men having a gay relationship." 
Right, but if its entertainment value is based on romance and gradually 
growing feelings of love, why not make the process as realistic and 
believable as you can?

That said, I found most of the sex scenes to be pretty steamy and they 
were written well, though they became repetitive after a while. Oddly, I 
found the best of the bunch were the most blatantly heterosexual  -- one 
in the beginning, where poor Duncan is mortified to be oiled up by an 
attractive female slave in preparation for his master's bed; and the 
other where, having established an uneasy relationship with Methos, 
he masturbates on the bed for his pleasure. Aside from the organs, he 
could have been a woman. Actually, the whole thing was almost a female 
wish fantasy: the relationship does not develop in a linear way, but 
instead eddies around in little pools, backcurrents, and stagnations, with 
Duncan as the "female" who is constantly losing control of himself and 
Methos playing the "man" who is just as passionate but feigns cruelty 
and detachment because he doesn't want to get hurt for loving too 
much. 

But despite the hot sex the story moved very slowly. This was a shame, as 
the authors had a very nice subplot going with the tribe under threat 
from another, and the minor characters were well drawn, and the 
sociocultural bits, while not especially detailed, seemed well-researched 
and plausible; but this made the romance all the more draggy and 
tedious. Between Chapters 5 and 18 nothing is advanced in the 
relationship besides a mild master-slave accommodation and a sort of 
transcendental soulbonding accomplished through sex. Usually when 
two people of whatever gender develop a relationship they share fun 
times together, or talk about what they have in common, or 
endure/enjoy common experiences; all the emphasis on pure passion, 
while fun for the authors, is lost on the reader, as it's a well-nigh 
impossible concept to get across to someone not in the relationship (or 
not creating it, as the author is.) The story was also not served well by 
depicting events from both Methos' and Duncan's POVs--it was like the 
entire story was neatly plotted and stitched and laid out in advance so 
you could see it all at once.

To be fair, the story shaped up around Chapter 18 when things finally 
started happening, and the two Immortals began to have conversations 
and got to know each other, and some real excitement began to gel when 
Methos considers abandoning his charges and running off with his 
bed-slave. But those chapters that came before were very hard to get 
through.

So, do I recommend this? Yes, if you are a slash fan and love the show or 
you want to read some hot M/M sex in the slashy vein. The writing was 
good and so was the sex. But if you're looking for good novel length D/s 
erotica, I'll think you'd be frustrated.

This is the last slash story I'll review for a while, I promise.

___________________________________________________
Comments to: ladycyrrh@aol.com
Website--->  http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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