| Title | : | The Sweetest Kiss |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Format Type | : | Kindle , Hardcover , Paperback , Audiobook & More |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
The Sweetest Kiss Reviews
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Aika yhdentekevä vampyyrierotiikka-antologia.
Seassa oli pari-kolme oikein hyvää novellia, monta keskinkertaista ja muutama varsin mitätön.
Kokonaisuuden perusongelma oli se, että suurin osa novelleista ei juuri eronnut toisistaan: ihminen tapaa vampyyrin (tai vampyyri ihmisen, valitusta näkökulmasta riippuen). Mennään sänkyyn, naidaan, juodaan vähän verta, the end. Vampyyrit olivat enimmäkseen juuri sellaisia kuin vampyyreiden kuvitellaan olevan. Seksi on, noh, seksiä. Kun lukee peräjälkeen sen kymmenennen melko samanlaisen yksityiskohtaisen seksikuvauksen, niin siitä alkaa mennä maku.
Erikoismaininta novelleille: Kathleen Bradean - Punaisen eri sävyt, T.N. Roberts - Verta ja pimeitä pulloja ja G.B. Kensington - Reilu peli.
Muista ei ollut niin väliä. -
4.5 stars for me...some of the stories were dead on....but some were all over the place...!!! But over all 4.5 for me!!! Thanks for the awesome read!!!!
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This collection of nineteen vampire stories casts a variety of spells, despite the glut of vampire fiction on the market. In these stories, the restlessness of modern travelers (mortal or immortal) meets the claustrophobic despair of static characters, like solid ghosts, who are trapped in particular places and old habits. The mortals in these stories are not the only ones who feel an ambivalent desire for the strange and exotic.
Here is Marta, the vampire narrator of Remittance Girl's story, "Midnight at Sheremetyevo:
"Ever since I joined the family, the annual journey to Zurich to arrange our legal and financial affairs has fallen to me. I'm the only one left of us who still loves the cold, the only one who yearns for a nice crisp snowy night."
On her way to Zurich, Marta has to spend several hours in an almost-empty Russian airport where she meets a delectable young man who finds her fatally attractive, and who is her undoing. Both of them suffer as a consequence of their mutual attraction; dark romance doesn’t get much better than this.
Thomas S. Roche's story, "Wait Until Dark, Montresor," begins with detailed instructions addressed to the reader, who is named for a character in the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Cask of Amontillado.” Presumably, the reader (male or female) wants to meet “Jen,” a waif-like vampire author who lives in a room over a coffee shop. This route could be traced on a map:
"The town of San Esteban is best reached by car on State Route 13, which slips off Interstate 101with subtlety, implying it doesn't wish to be noticed. Watch for the exit south of Ukiah, make your pukey, carsick way through the Coast Range and be sure to stop for an espresso and a home-baked brownie at Space Cowboy's shack just past the Chatelaine Reservoir about half-hour past Bargerville."
This story is as much about an otherwordly road trip in California, the state that has drawn so many of the curious and the hopeful from other places, as it is about picking up a celebrity who is really immortal.
In Maxim Jakubowski's story, "The Communion of Blood and Semen," an English writer who travels too much to form long-term attachments meets the female vampire of his dreams in cyberspace:
"We'd met in Manhattan. On, of all places, Craigslist, the Internet Sargasso of obscene desire, barter, thievery, fakery and false identities."
The lady is immortal, but not a femme fatale, and she offers to let the writer escape with his life. The gentleman, however, can’t bear to give her up.
Several of these stories dramatize the glamor and danger of nightlife in particular cities. Lisabet Sarai describes two English-speaking male tourists in Bangkok in “Fourth World.” A woman named Mai introduces herself and offers her hospitality – and her motives don’t make sense in terms of what the men think they know. As one of the men explains to his friend:
“An Aussie friend of mine says that Thailand is ‘fourth world’ – a world where laws and logic are indefinitely suspended. Where anything can happen, and usually does. It’s a surprising place.”
In Madeleine Oh’s “Nightlife,” another apparent lady of pleasure, this time in nineteenth-century Paris, picks up a sad man who drinks alone because he is deformed: his legs are abnormally short, but his cock is abnormally large. He never tells the lady his name, but he tells her that he is an artist who loves to record the nightlife of his city. He is clearly Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. By letting him live, the lady allows him to become as immortal in his way as she is in hers.
"Cutter" by Kristina Wright is set in the impersonal night world of Las Vegas, where gamblers go to satisfy various hungers. The narrator, a young woman who works in a casino, is a loner who sometimes cuts her own skin to relieve her emotional pain. It seems inevitable that, while smoking in an alley, she would attract a compassionate predator who is concerned about her bad habits, and who is willing to help her in exchange for being fed.
“Advantage” by Ciara Finn takes place in a private club in an unnamed city where human goths go to find a culture that is truly life-threatening:
"The Snake Pit is a low square room in the basement below a condemned apartment block; it's thick with smoke and music, voices and lust. It's not a club you can find a flyer for; you have to be a Pit native to be asked in. You meet new ones, every so often; the ones who want more risk, something more real; the ones who belong here, like me."
In this story, the narrator knows from the beginning what she is in for, and she finds that the animal nature of a vampire is only different in degree from the animal nature of the mortal men she has known.
Most of these stories self-consciously use the relationship of vampire and willing victim as a metaphor for a BDSM relationship, and in some cases, the lonely immortal predator is drawn to an urban BDSM community. In “Red by Any Other Name” by Kathleen Bradean, a professional Domme with human limitations responds to a telephone call from a male submissive – who turns out to be a vampire who seems to need more extreme handling than she can give him. The interplay between them involves mutual mind-reading, and she learns the secret of his submissiveness. His unvoiced litany of various words for the color red show her that she is the Mistress he has been looking for.
Like the vampire, “Red by Any Other Name” had a former life in an anthology from the now-defunct publisher Blue Moon (Blood Surrender, 2003), and it can now be enjoyed by readers who missed it the first time.
In “Takeout or Delivery?” by Evan Mora, a male vampire trolls the internet (like the writer in Maxim Jakubowski’s story) to find a willing female partner. Although he does not warn her about what he is and what he wants before meeting her, he is encouraged by her self-definition as a submissive, and she doesn’t disappoint him.
A vampire’s need for human blood can represent addictions of various kinds. Besides the “cutter” in the story of that name, there is a multiply-addicted young man in “Once An Addict . . .” by A.D.R. Forte. In this story, the female narrator needs to atone for what she did to her lover in a reckless moment – several centuries before. For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, she forces the modern man to kick his habits and return to life and health, despite his efforts to fight her off. Only when he has come to need her presence as much as he once needed mind-altering substances does she tell him why she chose him. They develop a mutual addiction:
“I catch sight of us sometimes in mirrors, once with him behind me, his cock tight in my ass, and his bleeding wrist pressed to my mouth, our eyes glazed with euphoria, with the high.”
The relationship of vampire and mortal lover provides both of them with something they have been seeking in vain for a long time.
Of course, part of the charm of vampire erotica is its historical dimension, since vampires can be “made” in any era and can then live into the present. Besides the story of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris, this anthology includes “The Temptation of Mlle. Marielle Doucette” by Anna Black, set during the French Revolution. The young woman of the title has been forced into the demimonde and falsely imprisoned. Becoming a vampire’s prey seems to her at first to be the ultimate degradation, and she is afraid of losing her immortal soul. Yet revenge is sweet, and this is only one of the perks she is offered. Her “temptation” tempts the reader to decide which choice we would make in the same circumstances.
In “Blood and Bootleg” by Teresa Noelle Roberts, a debutante of the 1920s tries to distract herself with sex and illegal booze from the pain of losing her beloved twin brother in the Great War of 1914-1918. When a strange German guest appears at her birthday party, Lily is incensed that her father would invite a “Hun” to the house. Yet the stranger has a long, painful history of his own, and he has a rare gift to offer her.
In these stories, the mortal “victim” is rarely completely unwilling to offer blood, and has often summoned the vampire by sending ripples of desire into the cosmos. In “The Student” by Sommer Marsden, the female student of the title has the brashness of youth. She relishes a dare, and therefore she goes into a decaying house in Maryland alone after dark after being warned that “even the most seasoned paranormal investigators will not go there.”
As the student discovers, the house is “haunted” by a resident vampire, not a ghost, and he is starving for fresh blood. Their relationship turns out to be surprisingly symbiotic.
In “Turn” by Nikki Magennis, a charismatic male vampire, Raam, shows up at a barbecue where he looks conspicuously out of place. He tells Prue, one of the other guests, that she “summoned” him, and she realizes the truth of this, despite the fact that her invitation was not deliberate or fully conscious.
“Enlightenment” by Amber Hipple is a less-specific story on the same theme. It is essentially a mood piece about a woman who looks forward to being visited at night by her supernatural lover.
In the misleadingly named “Wicked Kisses” by Michelle Belanger, a mortal woman has won a contest in her village to offer herself as a ritual victim in a temple where she will be aroused and fed on, presumably within prescribed limits, by vampires who can appear as any gender they choose.
Lesbian vampire fiction still seems to be a minority sub-genre, despite its age. (The novella Carmilla is the prototype, and it was published in 1872, long before Dracula.) I was glad to see one lesbian story in this collection: the heartbreaking “Devouring Heart” by Andrea Dale, in which a mortal woman falls in love with goth-looking (of course) Sorcha, who wants to protect her lover from sharing her own hellish condition. When Sorcha disappears for several days, the human lover suspects her of cheating. This story seems truer to its literary roots than the stories in which the huge gap between a human being and an immortal predator can be overcome through sexual ecstasy, and the lovers presumably live happily together for all eternity.
The one story in this book which seems out of place is “Kiss and Make Up” by Lisette Ashton, a kind of dark dirty joke about a vampire seductress who provokes her mate, Dracula, by seducing an innocent new male vampire who is unable to resist her charms or to realize that she has played this game many times before. Vampire humor is not a bad thing, but since it tends to debunk the tradition of vampires as objects of dread and desire, its appearance here undermines the mood that has already been set up.
In general, the quality of the writing in this book is vivid and hypnotic. Anyone with an interest in vampire erotica is likely to find at least one favorite story in this batch.
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For those of you that know me... and those that don't this is my little statement about short books.... I do not judge short stories on the rush of their relationships, because they are just that - short stories. So, yes the relationships always could have been drawn out more, yea it seems like they fall in love to fast and of course the story could have been made longer... but it is a short story. So with that said.... here is my review...
The Sweetest Kiss is a collection of erotic books... All about my one of my favorite paranormal creatures... Vampires! There are nineteen stories in this collection. Authors from every degree of writing. This collection was very well put together. Some stories I fell in love, some stories left me giggling... And some stories were on the dark side. But... hey we are talking about Vampires here... So what part of dark do you not expect when you read about them. There was nothing left unturned by these stories... Not even the humans who wanted to play in the immortal land of the night walkers... So why don't you take a walk on the dark side and pick up a copy... You never know what might bite your interest!
In these stories, there is lust, there is love... There is pain... but there is pleasure. Ohhh so much pleasure... When we talk about the creatures of the night, I can promise you... there will always be pleasure... I cannot promise you how it will end for everyone... but for those that understand the creatures that fascinate us, know what they are in for! Each author offers their own personality of writing and characters to each story and the collection of them all together.... left me feeling bitten! =)
I actually will be looking up some of these authors to see what else they have that might wet my appetite. A great collection of stories - especially if you love the things that go bump in the night... -
There was very few good vampire novels in this one but most of was clearly examples that authors shouldn't never write in drunk or drugs because it clearly sees in final writing as well as writing thoughts that should be erotic... and failing. So, to me this cavalcade of many failures would not really deserve one star. One star goes for Remittance Girl and Thomas R. Roche and Sommer Marsden ( even the main character was annoying b*ch. ) and when compared these brilliant minds to the rest of the dimwit misfitst their works are not enogh to pull the sinkin fishbait up to surface.
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Roikkunut lukupinossa luvattoman kauan, mutta virhe silti paarustaa yhteen mittaan menemään. Eroottisia vampyyrinovelleja nyt kun vain voi olla liikaa.
Muutama jäi mieleen kökköydessään ja tekstin uskomattomassa mahtipontisuudessaan, josta kääntäjäparka ei ollut ihan selvinnyt. Pari aidosti erilaisena ja hyvänä. Kierolla tavalla huvitti oivallus siitä, kuinka viiltelijä ja vampyyri ovat toisilleen juuri ne oikeat... -
I don't normally go for anthology's. This one however, I had to try. Erotic vampire fiction!!! Woo Hoo! Sexy and full of bite; This book delivers a wonderful collection of vampire stories to get your motor running!
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A collection of Vampire themed erotica... so far I have been more excited while reading regular fiction.
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Truly a great book if you enjoy "vampire porn"! These are more porn stories... than simply erotica. A lot of FUCKING, BITING... & BLOOD drinking / spilling.
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some stories were amazing others were dreadful. Kensington and bellinger were amazing
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En edes halua puhua tästä. Nappasin Suman hyllystä ihan vain nimen perusteella ja ai kamala mitä kuraa. Tuskaisesti kuitenkin pakotin itseni lukemaan läpi. Hyllyntäytettä, ei sen enempää.
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4.5 stars for me...some of the stories were dead on....but some were all over the place...!!! But over all 4.5 for me!!! Thanks for the awesome read!!!!
