| Title | : | Hottest Blood |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0671753673 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780671753672 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1993 |
Hottest Blood Reviews
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If you like your sex spiced with some dark, macabre, and blood, then this book is for you. I was 17 when I read it, and the stories have stayed with me years later. I would warn only that this is possibly the most disturbing stuff I've ever read. It is barely erotica, and very much horror, with playful bits and pieces of humor and political statement.
A collection of short stories, the themes range from necrophilia to numerology. There are nods to famous people (a Holmes/Watson duo) and even a story about a traumatized mentally ill woman. All are heavily dosed with sex, and some are so unnerving that I have only read them once, though I have revisited the book on more than one occasion. Horrors (and pleasures) seem to be visited upon men as equally as women, though I doubt many females will find this book tasteful. My favorite story depicts a back-country woods scenario that would make any feminist recoil in disgust.
In spite of all this, it's actually a very entertaining read. You cannot help but wonder just what the f#%k is going to happen. After reading
Maps in a Mirror (where Card admits there are a few horror stories so gruesome even his wife will not read them), I have learned that there is power in more than just shock value. Even so, I just picked up a copy on eBay to ensure the book was in my collection.
Stirring enough to leave nightmares, Hottest Blood was a wild ride. -
Some of these stories are not what I would call horror and some not really erotic. There were some good stories mixed in but the majority of the stories were bland.
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Wanted to try something a bit titillating, so came across this collection of short stories, each more erotic and perverse than the previous. Where the hell do people come up with crazy shit? I admit, I enjoyed a few for it's creative shock value. Stories range from 1 - 3 stars. Time to wash out my eyes with vodka!
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Shelf Life – Hottest Blood: The Ultimate in Erotic Horror is Neither of Those Things
(I’m gonna go ahead and throw a disclaimer on up here: You are about to read something that deals with purportedly “erotic” subject matter. If you don’t like the sound of that word, you might wanna go elsewhere. If it’s actually-erotic things that offend you, though, you’ll be fine.)
I like short story compilations because you get a variety of content that’s just as easy to breeze through if you have the time as it is to get to a stopping point and put down if you don’t. I like horror fiction because it usually involves the super-natural, which interests me, and intense emotional responses, which are almost always a good thing in writing. And I like eroticism because I am a warm-blooded human being with a pulse. However, on the whole, I do not like Hottest Blood.
I wanted to, I did. Look at that cover. It’s equal amounts scary and sexy, both in completely safe, PG-13-at-most kind of ways. Unfortunately, Softcore Succubus here is both the scariest and the sexiest thing about this book
Bluntly analogized, you know that feeling you get when you come across something on the internet that disturbs and/or disgusts you, and then you learn that there’s a dedicated group of people that gets off on it? Most of the stories in this book are that feeling captured in words.
Case in point, the story “Damaged Goods” by Elizabeth Massie, which as far as I can tell is about a couple of physically abused, emotionally damaged, developmentally stunted kids somewhere around their early teens who live with a religious fringe cult being led out to a field to have sex with each other while a nameless U.S. President watches and masturbates before both kids are drowned in a river by their preacher/pimp caretaker.
Or there’s “Mr. Right” by Chris Lacher, which tells the story of a college student named Russ who has a secret fetish for the deformed women in the freak show at a nearby carnival – a fascination which leads to him getting held down and forcibly raped by a group of unwashed subhuman mutants, which the detailed descriptions make sure you understand are completely revolting to all five senses. The story ends with him being dumped out behind the fairgrounds while a small, legless girl happily informs him that this is how all carnival workers reproduce, and he can look forward to seeing his own mutant rape-spawn in the show next year.
Or there’s “Abuse” by Matthew Costello, which simply shows us how the arrest of a Peewee Herman surrogate goes down in an adult movie theater before ending with another man jerking off with the cold, dry, severed hand in his pocket as he contemplates getting a new one to replace it.
The tone of these three are pretty much par for the course for the rest of the book: thoroughly disturbing, and sex is involved, but the disturbing feeling stems from revulsion rather than fear, and the sex bits are so far on the other end of the spectrum from erotic that it feels like the authors are trying to punish their readers for even expecting to be aroused in any way.
Of course, I said myself earlier that intense emotional responses are “almost always a good thing in writing.” By that merit alone, this book technically succeeds; in fact, if it had billed itself as shock fiction instead of erotic horror, I’d begrudgingly give it a medal in its class. The “aw, what the hell?!” moments are not as artistically executed as, say, a Chuck Palahniuk read, and they tend not to have as much depth to them, but strictly in terms of making you wish that you could unread words, they get the job done.
But that isn’t the job that Hottest Blood was hired to do, and that’s not what it put on its resume. It said it was going to “heat the blood and chill the mind,” and promised that “terror never felt this sexy!” It would have been more appropriate to say that “sex never felt this terrible.”
All of that said, if you abandon any hope of seeing anything resembling erotica or horror (scary horror, anyway), there are a few stories in here that are decent reads – mostly because they try to say something with their subject matter rather than use it to see how thoroughly they can ruin the idea of sex for the reader. To give a few quick nods of approval:
Nancy Holder’s “I Hear the Mermaids Singing,” which opens the anthology, is a dark and modern re-imagining of “The Little Mermaid” that brutally points up the drawbacks to throwing away your whole life and family in order to pursue someone that you know nothing about outside of a few fleeting glimpses and lustful inner fantasies.
J.L. Comeau’s “Black Cars” is the narrative of a high-class chauffeur as he tells his passenger an increasingly mysterious story about a couple of his regular customers, culminating in a creepy twist payoff that, in retrospect, actually makes it count as a legitimate horror story, and a decently gripping one at that.
And “Safe at Home” by Steve and Melanie Tem, while decidedly and disturbingly unsexy, at least has good reason to be; it’s a short character study of a young woman who’d been molested as a child, and the lasting and complex psychological damage resulting thereof that prevents her from having any normal social life or relationships, even with someone whom she legitimately likes, someone who knows what’s happened and sincerely cares for her.
So for the handful of intriguing stories that don’t make you quit (or wish you had) mid-read out of revolted disappointment, I can’t completely condemn Hottest Blood. If you want to test your own threshold for repulsion but are understandably hesitant to use online image searches to this end, I heartily recommend it.
If you are legitimately turned on by the idea of a man eating a woman alive and then gestating her alien spawn inside his own bloated body until his head detaches and crawls away (“How Deep the Taste of Love,” John Shirley), I suppose I still heartily recommend it, though I do so from a safe distance.
If you want to read one of the few stories involved that aren’t horrible, I heartily recommend trying to find them on their own somewhere else first.
But if you want “the ultimate in erotic horror,” stay the hell away. Softcore Succubus is a trap. -
So what to say about this book. Of course with a book that has nothing but short stories in them it's really hard to review each and every story. Some for me stood out more than others but; each writer in it's own right deserved to have their story in this book. Makes me want to go out and get the rest of the series. One thing to note that this book is very much intended for the mature reader because every story deals with sex. Overall the stories really kept you on the edge wanting more.
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The Hot Blood series are tales of erotic horror, which is the best combination ever. When something as personal and sensitive as sex is mixed with horror, what could possible scare you shitless more? So I set out to explore them all, all 13 books of the series, thus Project Hot Blood.
First, some info about my rating system. The level of paranormal of each story is one to five, one meaning it surely can happen in real life, five meaning it’s utterly something paranormal. The level of sex describes how graphic is the sex in each story, one to five, one being tame a bedtime story told by a nun, five being a detailed script for a hardcore porn movie. My rating’s from one to ten, it’s based on the balance of horror and erotic, so getting five in ‘level of sex’ doesn’t automatically mean an above average rating from me. It’s based on the wtf-ness of the ending, how freaked out I am, how nightmare-generating it is. One being rubbish, ten being masterpiece. It’s time to move on to the third book in my Project Hot Blood. Let's begin.
I Hear the Mermaids Singing
Nancy Holder – author of series such as “Wicked” and “Wolf Springs Chronicles”
Fairy tales are hardly ever as colorful and shiny as Disney versions, but Nancy Holder’s version of the Little Mermaid is as eerie as those classic gothic tales from the past, at the same time it has a healthy dose of the brutality of the 21st century. The casual style of injecting issues such as extreme ‘daddy issues’ and domestic violence makes the story more disturbing. I was thoroughly confused in the end whether the whole story is just the imagination of a crazy mind.
Length: 13 pages
Level of Sex: 2 There was fishy sex.
My rating: 7 out of 10 Though not that violent, it sure makes up for its creepiness.
Llama
Bentley Little – horror author of almost 90 distinct works
What a strange little story. There were lots of numbers, like the dates and measures of things and distances, all happen to be around the same sets of numbers. But I was left perplexed… what the hell do the numbers have to do with anything? And the llama? Dafuq? Though I usually enjoy coincidences associated with numbers, but it was so overwhelmingly in the center in this story that the hard facts revealed in the end were just another set of numbers.
Length: 8 pages
Level of Sex: 3 Odd sex indeed.
My rating: 4 out of 10 It was odd, but not in a good way.
Where the Heart Was
David J. Schow
It’s like a 80’s horror B-movie, combining sex, extreme violence and humor. It’s about adultery, sadistic homicidal tendencies and a vengeful zombie that just wouldn’t give up. It’s like the movie “Crash” from 1996, but instead of getting turned on by car accidents, the vice this time is murder.
Length: 19 pages
Level of Sex: 3 Decent amount and quality.
My rating: 7 out of 10 It sure was entertaining and not too concern of the possibility of zombies.
The Last Crossing
Thomas Tessier – the author of the award-winning novel “Fog Heart”
I like surprises, and I got a little one from here towards the ending. It’s about the classic middle-aged man, freshly downsized, postponing the untempting confession to the wife at home, therefore getting shitfaced on martinis with a dash of young girls. Most part of the story would have been quite boring if I wasn’t waiting shit to happen all the time. In the end, it is the Hot Blood after all, shits always hit the fan.
Length: 11 pages
Level of Sex: 1 Second-base only.
My rating: 6 out of 10 If not for the mildly surprising ending, this would have been a four.
Damaged Goods
Elizabeth Massie – the author of the award-winning novel “Sineater”
Sometimes Hot Blood stories are so strange that even if you understood the story, you’re not sure what it’s about. “Damaged Goods” is about a slutty bimbo and a less-than-smart young man who are told they could save the world by having sex. I think. I’m not quite sure. It’s a little odd and unsettling, and the ‘twist’ in the end didn’t come as a surprise.
Length: 10 pages
Level of Sex: 2
My rating: 3 out of 10
Hillbettys
Graham Watkins
The premise of the story was quite interesting enough. A doctor wrecked his car in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of pretty ‘hillbetties’ offered him some help. We all know that when something’s too good to be true, it probably is. So what was the big secret? The first part of the story got my hopes up so high that the big revelation was slightly anti-climatic. By no means the revelation was conventional, it was actually quite bizarre, but the last part of the story gave out the vibe of a 90’s day time show… or any supermarket romance novel.
Length: 16 pages
Level of Sex: 1
My rating: 5 out of 10
Abuse
Matthew Costello
I quite liked this story. Though the main focus could have been in the last part of the story instead of the first part. So it was about the time in the past when police actually had the time to catch men masturbating during a naughty movie in the theater. Oh, those times before the Internet and all that porn.
Length: 8 pages
Level of Sex: 2 Masturbation and movie magic.
My rating: 7 out of 10
Forever in My Thoughts
Don D’Ammassa
One word: CREEEEEEPY! Okay. So. A poor woman’s dreams got invaded by this creepy-ass loser from work and his pathetic and cheesy fantasies. The invasion then finally got to be too much, driving the woman to using extreme measures. Actually I would have done the same, except way earlier and on purpose too. And goddammit, always, like every time, check your kill, people. This is, if any, a cautionary tale.
Length: 15 pages
Level of Sex: 2 Invasive but not that graphic.
My rating: 7 out of 10
Blind Date
Julie Wilson
Just how deep is the greed of humankind? So I had next to none sympathy in me for our heroine, cos can somebody really be this stupid? Some man offers you five grand to fuck a stranger, blindfolded, and he would only watch, and you believe him? Anyway, I liked the ending though.
Length: 12 pages
Level of Sex: 3
My rating: 6 out of 10
Sex Object
Graham Masterton
Trophy wife’s life is not easy. Look at this little gal all ready to go under the knife, all for satisfying her rich husbands insatiable needs. It’s quite hard to think of another fictional character quite like this husband, with as many perverted obsession. Well, maybe the men from the one and only Marquis de Sade’s sinful masterpiece “The 120 Days of Sodom“. I’m surprised that he just wouldn’t get more girls. Another cautionary tale, girls. No money or guy is worth changing your body for in such an irreversible way.
Length: 19 pages
Level of Sex: 5 For the weirdness and every perversion in the book
My rating: 7 out of 10
Box 69
Rex Miller
Talk about annoying main characters. A man picks up a woman, who is way out of his league, from the casino bar. Remember what I said about things being too good to be true? The way the leading man described what he was going through with an exceptionally annoyingly disgusting way. It might be the cheesiness, or the rhyming or just the pure stupidity. All of it made me hate him before the shit happened. I do admire the thoroughness though.
Length: 10 pages
Level of Sex: 2 It’s just so confusing, I’m not sure what happened.
My rating: 5 out of 10 Would have been higher if it wasn’t written in such an annoying way.
Prized Possession
Jeff Gelb – the editor of the Hot Blood series
I always dream to be a collector. I’m a small-league hoarder, but never devoted enough to have a large amount of anything. So starting right of the bat, I do admire the guys of this story of their dedication. And of course there’s no such a thing as healthy competition between rivals. This little story is short and sweet and it ends with a bang.
Length: 9 pages
Level of Sex: 1.5 Not much.
My rating: 8 out of 10
Mr. Right
Chris Lacher
So it’s about a man who went into a freak show at the carnival. Lots of nonsense which doesn’t seem to be relevant to the story at all. Needs a lot of character building. And the ending was supposed to be terrifying. Well, maybe it was, for men.
Length: 11 pages
Level of Sex: 3 Not much, but it sure was nasty!
My rating: 5 out of 10
At the Count of Three
Michael Garrett
Ever wondered whether you could get laid by hypnotizing someone to do the deed with you? I never quite believe in hypnotism. Well, not not believing, I recognize that it probably exists, just that I don’t think I can be hypnotized, so the concept of it is far-fetched at the best. Apart from that, this story was decent, but didn’t quite make sense at the last part. The story said it, in order for you to do something major while hypnotized, you have to want it for real. So I don’t get how the male lead can work with his loophole.
Length: 12 pages
Level of Sex: 2 In the style of a peeping tom.
My rating: 5 out of 10
Genderella
Ron Dee
Oh puppy love. The most aggressive form of love and obsession blossoms in this twisted version of Cinderella. Unrequited love is already hard enough without all the teenage angst and wrong genders. The ending was horrific and confusing, and feels exactly like the stepsisters jamming their too-big foot into the delicate glass shoe. Even toe-cutting sounds more appealing than what happened in this story.
Length: 14 pages
Level of Sex: 4 Graphic until the end.
My rating: 7 out of 10
Safe at Home
Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
Actually it was really well written. I liked the flashbacks. It is about the delicate theme of abuse and bad childhood memories, I just felt that the leading lady’s take on life and her dark past was frustrating and cowardly. I’m not judging, I’m just the more proactive type. The story is a little too short, but is more of a psychological struggle than a decent horror story.
Length: 8 pages
Level of Sex: 2 Not overtly graphic, of which I am, for once, glad
My rating: 5 out of 10
How Deep the Taste of Love
John Shirley
The beginning was too slow a pace. The ending was too rushed. And I simply want to know more! It started to feel like that picking up a woman from the bar is never a good idea. In this case, it’s a really fucking bad idea. It was so weird! Though it was entertaining enough, this would at best make a really crappy horror B-movie from the 80’s with a healthy dash of near-porn.
Length: 14 pages
Level of Sex: 4 Graphic and disgusting
My rating: 6 out of 10
Hard Evidence
John Edward Ames
This story about a hard-boiled cop is definitely the worst one yet of all the Hot Blood books so far. It was like a little fan-fic about nothing in particular that got lost in a Hot Blood book.
Length: 12 pages
Level of Sex: 0 Okay, that lady is SEX-XY, I get that.
My rating: 0 out of 10
The Room Where Love Lives
Grant Morrison – the author of the best story (The Braille Encyclopaedia) in Hotter Blood
I had high hopes for this one, because Grant Morrison wrote the best story of Hotter Blood. While The Braille Encyclopaedia was more superior, The Room wasn’t bad at all. In fact it’s one of the best in Hottest Blood. It’s about this room designed to make people want to have sex real bad. While the idea of it is pretty absurd, as was everything else that happened in that room. But the hero of the story, Aubrey Valentine saved the day! The story did end with a rather too philosophical note to my taste, it does make me want to read more of Valentine’s adventures.
Length: 16 pages
Level of Sex: 5 As to be expected, graphic rough shit
My rating: 8 out of 10
Black Cars
J. L. Comeau
I love the way this short story was written. It was literally driver telling a very interesting story to his current client in the car. I felt like I was on the edge of my seat and in that car listening to the story. I would have given this 10 out of 10 if I didn’t guess the ending way too early.
Length: 12 pages
Level of Sex: 0 None, maybe some idea of it, but strangely and surprisingly it didn’t bother me.
My rating: 8 out of 10
Review of the whole book
I thought it would be fun to get some review statistics together like I did with the first book, but didn’t do for the second one. I might go back to update the second book review. But here are some numbers:
20 stories
Stories with a rating below 6 out of 10: 11
Stories with a rating 7 out of 10: 6
Stories with a rating 8 out of 10: 3
Best stories:
Prized Possession & The Room Where Love Lives & Black Cars
Most erotic story: Sex Object & The Room Where Love Lives
Most memorable stories: Sex Object -
Intro by Jeff Geib & Michael Garrett
standard - welcome to the third book in our series.
I Hear the Mermaids Singing by Nancy Holder
A disturbing retelling of The Little Mermaid, a bit more in common with the Disney version than the original Hans Christian Anderson - except more dark than either
Llama by Bentley Little
Bentley Little is whacked. This is an odd little tale. Numbers abound as the character attempts to find order in chaos (of his own making).
Where the Heart Was by David J. Schow
A disturbing little tale, where love never dies - even when the body does. Just kept getting grosser.
The Last Crossing by Thomas Tessier
oh the tales we convince ourselves of when there is something we really want to do, but know we shouldn't. Domestic violence taken to the extreme.
Damaged Goods by Elizabeth Massie
an interesting story of religion and politics.
Hillbettys by Graham Watkins
LOVED. a classic stuck in the wilds with uneducated rubes story...with a twist.
Abuse by Matthew Costello
what if the cops focus on the wrong thing? What if it ends up letting someone get away, who really shouldn't?
Forever in My Thoughts by Don D'Ammassa
DISTURBING. It is said we actually CAN feel the weight of someone's stare - and so begins this tale of obsession.
Blind Date by Julie Wilson
Be careful who you trick; and be careful how confident you are when you trick that person. An interesting twist, and then another. Liked this one a lot.
Sex Object by Graham Masterton
ew. Plastic Surgery is not for everyone. Really, its not.
Box 69 by Rex Miller
This one reminds me of the old urban legend, where the victim wakes up to find their kidney gone.
Prized Possession by Jeff Gelb
A little bit sad. Amazing how far our obsessions can take us.
Mr. Right by Chris Lacher
Freaks. yep. Freaks.
At the Count of Three by Michael Garrett
Hypnosis cannot make someone fall in love with you.
Genderella by Ron Dee
Definitely a horror ending. I can see this tale making a cute teen romance movie, with a different ending of course.
Safe At Home by Steve & Melanie Tem
weird. i got lost in this one.
How Deep the Taste of Love by John Shirley
ewww. just ewww.
Hard Evidence by John Edward Ames
This got a lot of the police procedural stuff pretty close, and it seems I have seen this type of story somewhere -- maybe an adaptation of this short story? A female suspect who elicits "feelings" for all she runs across
The Room Where Love Lives by Grant Morrison
I really liked this story, and would love to read more Valentine tales!
Black Cars by J. L. Comeau
another one with hints of an urban legend. These stories were pre-Uber and Lyft, but they have a bit of a moral to the story reference those type of services. -
These anthologies can be very, um...strange. Some of the stories were really impressive,though. I liked the one that was a take-off on Sherlock Holmes about a room that possesses anyone who goes into it,and I liked the story about the gay teenager who turns into a girl for one night so that he can sleep with the jock he loves- and the tragic (but also pretty funny) fate that befalls both of them when he transforms back too soon.....and the one that surprised me the most was the one that started with the well worn stereotype of a guy picking up a beautiful mysterious woman at a bar 0 I mean, hello, how many times has that been done- but the author really took it to an original place (aliens, tarantula venom and fake cannibalism) It was so strange I wondered about the person who could come up with it. That was a common feeling when reading the book. There are weird people out there....although the truth is I didn't find this book to be "erotic" in the sense of a romance novel, (which are basically soft core porn for women) but it had interesting stories nevertheless.
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Originally there was Hot Blood, Hotter Blood, and this one, Hottest Blood. They are collections of short horror stories with erotic elements. As a group, all three books are quite good and there are some truly memorable stories throughout the three. Personally, I remember more stories from the first two in the series than from this one.
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My sister had this book and thought I;d beinterested in it since I like vampires and the like. It was one of the most bizarre things I've ever read but I couldn't put it down! I'll never forget the Llama story or the one about the wife who ended up getting herself covered with vaginas. Very, very odd.
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Not for the neophyte, puritan, faint of heart, or "average" fetishist. Fascinating stuff that will bury itself in your id, and come to light at the oddest times...
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Seriously hard to read. Sad and very bloody- if you like that sort of thing- they're amazing.
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Horror,erotica,taboo all rolled into one. Amazing collection of stories.
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Most of these stories were warped, perverse, or a combination of the two. Many were more perverse than they were erotic, and there are a great many taboo themes thrown in just for the sake of being "edgy" without ever hitting that mark. Very few were anything I would actually categorize as horror. Some were good, some were okay, and quite a few were downright terrible, but as with any collection, that's kind of to be expected.
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I don't think I found one story interesting.
Ended up giving up and putting it in the give away box (mm maybe I'll make it a bookcrossing book and release it somewhere)
This was basically bathroom fodder and should have left it as such. (Heck I should have flushed it if I didn't think it would clog up the toilet) -
Worth the price for the graham piece.
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Kudos to Matthew Costello for literally having his entry just be a story about Pee-Wee Herman's porno theater incident.
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Hottest Blood is a mixed bag of short stories with a sexual theme running through most of them. The overall impression is more "Tales of the Unexpected" than horror, although some of the stories have horror elements. There is enough entertainment here to make it a worthwhile read, if you like that sort of thing.
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Read ??/??/??
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I truly loved it, they don't write short stories like these anymore!
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I liked the majority of the stories in this book. Some of them made me laugh while others just confused the hell out of me. Definately in the horror category, no mistake.
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Very erotic and interesting. Not for kids or even teens.
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wild ride...
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A collection of short stories that are more erotic than horror. Recommended
