Free and Cheap Books! Just a Few Hours Longer!

Dang it! I'm really late making this announcement here, but to celebrate the release of Contrast, I put Gloria's Daughter in free giveaway mode, and reduced the price of Sexpossessed to just 99 cents!

Hurry on over and pick them up while there's still time!

Contrast Arrives!

Well, it's taken me ages to revise it, format it, and create a cover, but as of tomorrow, Contrast is officially available for Kindle and for purchase in hardcopy form!

I'm pretty proud of this story ... it hung onto the all-time number-one spot on Literotica's best-rated Interracial Romance toplist for a good chunk of last year, and it came within a hair's breadth of winning the Readers Choice Award in its category. Despite being almost entirely sex scenes, it's always gotten raves on the quality of the storytelling, dialogue, and characters.

Check it out if you haven't already read it ... and if you have already read it, please go and leave a review even if you don't buy a copy. I'll be eternally grateful!

My Review of She Dies at the End by A.M. Manay

Kept me up way past my bedtime!

This book is about twice as long as anything I've read in months, yet I still found it an extremely quick read. It's a page-turner that repeatedly kept me up later than I wanted, intending to read "just one more chapter," only to find I had to read the next, and the next, and the next. Author A.M. Manay understands how to put together compelling and original situations that seize the reader tight, balancing mysteries and revelations with a keen precision that maintains a constant sense of wonder and discovery.

Our heroine, November Snow, is a young psychic whose gifts have twisted her already-bleak life into an existence of desperate isolation and nightmare. For eighteen years, she has seen her own death in dreams -- and the lives and deaths of almost everyone around her. Plagued by extrasensory flashes she can't control, she lives as reclusively as possible, to insulate herself from constant visions. But her talent is also her only means of support, and she must put herself through torment every day giving readings from her tent in a traveling carnival.

All of this changes whipcrack fast one evening when the people she has seen burying her a thousand times finally appear at the entrance to her tent. At once, she knows her death is even nearer than she expected -- and yet she also feels a tremendous liberation: she no longer has to wait in dread for the moment that begins her end.

And she is no longer the only figure with supernatural abilities in her life, for the arrival of the strangers plunges her into a hidden world of faeries, vampires, and werewolves she had never before imagined. Forces beyond her understanding want to capture her, to bind and use her power. And the certainty of dying young no longer reins as the greatest thing she has to fear. What's most remarkable about the book is November's ability to continuously surprise us and those around her. A life of pain and darkness and terror has equipped her uniquely to accept the sudden alteration of reality, and has lent her a strength of character and a stubborn, determined core of hope that helps her again and again to bear the unbearable and shake off things that would paralyze most ordinary people.

"She Dies at the End" glows with the vulnerable brightness of its protagonist and sparkles with a cast of vivid, complex characters. It spins a web of ancient enmities and epic clandestine war, builds a shadow world beneath our own, and makes us root for its heroine on every page and through every danger.

Contrast Cover Reveal!

Well, mostly. It's not quite finished, but this is the general idea.

The interior is almost entirely formatted, so I'll probably be ready to order my proof copy from Createspace within the next week, aiming for a release date somewhere near the end of the month.

It's long overdue, considering I finished the last edit nearly a year ago!

Hopefully I'll get Big Flipping Deal and The Inn packaged up a lot quicker than that ...

My Review of Out: Five Erotic Stories of Gay Self-Discovery

Phenomenal Storytelling

I was offered the opportunity to review this before its official release, and let me tell you, I jumped on it. It's not that I'm a particular a fan of gay male erotica ... like most guys of my generation, I was unfairly socialized to be creeped out by homosexuality. And while I'm enlightened enough now that I'd definitely do 1993 Jason Scott Lee if he came looking for me in a time machine, my boat is generally not floated by depictions of gay sex.

But Patient Lee has such a masterful grasp of character and such finesse at writing human sensuality that I knew I would enjoy a collection of her stories, gay or straight, and that the subject matter of this one would probably deal yet another blow to the idiotic but stubborn uneasiness I've been saddled with by my youth in the 20th century South with respect to thoughts of gay sex.

I'm glad to say I was correct on all counts.

First and foremost, the stories in this book are about people, not about gay guys. Sure, all the people happen to turn out to either be gay or have an affinity for gay sex, but the point is to carry us on a series of human journeys into self-discovery, to take us places most of us have never been - and yet, places most of us will find familiar and compelling and identifiable at the same time.

(Mild spoilers in this paragraph) Each of these stories features some element of tremendous discomfort - a teenage boy wrestling with the demons of having watched his mother killed by his father; a divorced parent tempted into gay experimentation in circumstances we know will lead to public exposure; a man forced to admit to his girlfriend that he's had a lifelong secret desire to have sex with another man; a pair of fishermen falling in love on a crab boat where the close quarters might get them beaten to a pulp, fired, or maybe thrown overboard if they're found out; and a mentally impaired young man bullied into invading a gay couple's home for the purpose of committing a hate crime.

By immersing us deeply and sympathetically into these situations, Lee gives even the straight, sheltered hetero reader some sense of the fear or shame or self-loathing that might come with a life spent hiding one's sexuality from the world, or even from one's self. And yet in each case, there's a suffusion of hope and potential happiness undergirding the inner and external conflicts that task the characters. Story after story, Lee nurtures and tends to that potential until it blooms into full beauty - sometimes through passionate encounters, but sometimes through the simple sense of liberty or understanding that she gifts upon her protagonists and readers alike.

Finishing up the last of the volume today, I found myself emotionally overwhelmed, blinking back tears, and very much in awe of this author's brilliance.

As for the sex, Lee shows an unending capacity to produce heartfelt word-sculptures of such pure allure and arousal that at one point, I even found myself attracted to my number-one "no way, never" sex act and thinking, "Well ... maybe ..." (Not sure I care to name it here, but if you want a hint, it involves no genitalia.)

If you have any appreciation of gay male erotica, you should snap this book up immediately. On the other hand, if the genre makes you uncomfortable, you should still snap it up.

One way or another, it will speak to you.

Well, Fuck.

A number of readers have commented to me that my serial Contrast is a surprisingly good story, considering that it's mostly a lot of fucking. I'm always flattered by this sentiment, because I'm proud of the story and think I did a pretty creative job crafting an interesting tale almost exclusively out of sex scenes.

At the same time, though, I find the degree and frequency of this surprise to be a poor reflection on society.

We've been deceived by our culture into believing that sex is an animal activity, not a fundamentally human one. It's a relic of our baser natures, we're taught, and demeans us if we undertake it purely for its own sake. As a result, even people who are pro-sex tend to focus on its gratification aspects, not its connective ones. So most fuck stories are about the physiological rather than the psychological benefits of sex. It's a real measure of how damaged we all are by sex-negative socialization.

Can you imagine someone expressing surprise about finding deep emotional content in a story with one of the following setups?

Two people meet while jogging in the park where several paths join. They smile at each other and run side-by-side for a while because their speeds are pretty much the same. They each get greater enjoyment out of the experience than from running alone, and on a whim, agree to meet up and jog regularly without talking.

Or: Two people end up sitting at adjacent tables in a restaurant. Each of them finds this restaurant a cozy comfort spot, and the chef's skills always result in a unique dining experience. After noticing each other in the restaurant regularly, one of them approaches the other after a meal and says, "I'm not trying to pick you up or anything, but I just had to gush to someone about how fantastic the salmon was tonight." They agree to start dining together with discission limited to the food and ambiance of the restaurant.

Or: Two people are stranded on a desert island together. One is deaf and mute, and the other doesn't understand sign language or English, so their initial communications are obviously very restricted. But it's cold at night, and so they always sleep huddled together for warmth and comfort.

Nobody would expect those stories to be shallow or crass based on the descriptions, even though they're built around activities that, like sex, animals are just as capable of as humans. Written well, one of those stories might even win awards in the mainstream fiction world or get made into a blockbuster movie. But even if Contrast were written ten times as well as it is, it would never win a literary award and could never be made into an acclaimed Hollywood film. 50 Shades of Grey attained notoriety, but I don't know of anyone who respects it artistically, and it's a lot less sex-focused than Contrast.

Hopefully things will change someday.

Maybe I can push them along by writing more stories like Contrast. If not ... well, I do enjoy writing stories about people fucking. I guess I'll console myself with that.

Review: The Brodsky Affair by Ken Fry

Art and Action!

It took a little while for this book to get me firmly in its corner. I'm not a huge fan of exposition, and there's a moderate amount of that in the first few chapters, setting up the situation and the characters. It was all interesting information; I was just impatient for the story to get going. The old-school grammarian in me also spotted a few dangling modifiers, but I don't think most people pay the least mind to that these days.

As the plot started rolling, though, I quickly became absorbed, and then found myself really gripped by the page-turning intensity that author Ken Fry conjured from his multi-character setup and a series of deftly inserted historical flashbacks that gave weight and meaning to the modern-day heist/caper/thriller storyline. Fry may dangle the occasional modifier, but he knows how to gut-punch when the story calls for it, and this book has plenty of visceral passages to raise the reader's pulse and keep the adrenaline flowing.

The Brodsky Affair centers on Jack Manton, an English art expert down on his luck because the art publication he worked for went under, leaving him exceptionally qualified in a field with few opportunities. Manton isn't a quitter, though -- in fact, his ability to pursue loose ends of research borders on obsessive, and when he gets wind of a couple of potentially undervalued paintings about to be auctioned in Perth, Australia, he begins a globe-hopping quest in pursuit of the art of Mikhail Brodsky, an obscure Russian painter who died in the Holocaust. Unfortunately for Manton, a Russian mobster also has his sights set on Brodsky's work, as the painter's reputation is on the rise thanks to one of those art-world trends that can make fortunes for those with proper insight and timing.

What Manton expects to be a money-making venture to salvage his ailing finances quickly embroils him in a web of crime and murder, as the agents of oligarch Josef Berezin are following some of the same leads as Jack -- but intend on nabbing the paintings through means other than a few harmless auction bids. By the time Jack and his girlfriend, Tamsin Greene, realize how far over their heads they've gotten, bad timing and the brutal methods of Berezin's chief operative have made them suspects in multiple murders, with Interpol on their heels on top of the assassin.

Elevating The Brodsky Affair above its high-octane set of mysteries, chases, and murders is Fry's ability to bring the world of high art and especially the paintings of Mikhail Brodsky to life. Brodsky appears as a character by way of occasional flashbacks, but the deeper we get into the novel, the more his presence is felt in the central action, as Manton and Greene trace his few surviving relatives across Russia and Europe, encountering more of his personal history and suffering, as well as more of his paintings, which Fry imbues with a vivid, bright-hued reality that makes one wish they were real and on display in some museum for viewing. Through quick and keen descriptions Fry convinces us of Brodsky's genius, his eye for color, his choice of theme, his role as a witness to history. He makes us understand why some might find these paintings worth a fortune -- and others might find them worth killing for.

The novel goes a bit over the top at times, straining credulity the way a Hollywood action movie might. And I didn't much care for the epilogue. But the unique quirks and foibles of its characters, the adeptness with which Fry builds and maintains a breakneck pace, and the sense of art transcending time and history all serve to keep the book fresh and compelling.