intense sensations

Spankalicious by D.L. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can judge this book by its cover. And what a beautiful cover it is! The title is also a very clear and rousing signal of what to expect.

In fact most of these stories are all about surfaces. Surfaces that are, for the most part, round, shiny, quivering and beaten hard until they are, as D.L. King puts it poetically in her story called The Upper Hand, “strawberry red.”

This direct approach will appeal to a lot of readers. The stories have a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point professionalism that commands respect.

I think of this as a New York style of writing about sex. Maybe this is how New Yorkers actually have sex. I have never had sex with a New Yorker so I’m not sure but it seems to me that they label up their fetishes and display them like tins in a grocery store, waiting for the right customer to come along.

“Just come in. Don’t knock.”

So begins Designated Hitter by Big Ed Magusson and it more or less sets the tone of the anthology.

In The Upper Hand, the narrator’s “girl” places an advertisement for a “submissive male” in order to mete out the kind of punishment for which she is usually on the receiving end. The gender of the narrator only becomes clear half way through the story when he experiences a certain stiffening in his nether region.

In many ways, gender is unimportant. The most important traits in these stories is whether the characters are dommes, subs or switches.

In Little Boys by Angela R Sargenti, the narrator has things down so pat, if you’ll pardon the pun, that she has her own shorthand. Her idea of closeness is OTK (over the knee).

“Lucy was wet the moment he knocked on her front door,” we learn in On Switch by Penelope Pruitt (who is actually from Alabama). So much for foreplay. But (perhaps because the author is from Alabama) there is in fact a back story here. There are also some secrets and some pent-up passion that are conveyed with the directness and efficiency seen throughout the anthology.

The stories are all very short. You’ll race through them quickly. They have pace.

But the one I liked most was A Cure For Excess by Annabeth Leong, which I liked because it was a little more leisurely than the rest. There is some dialogue that isn’t about sex. There are some emotions, some tension, some resistance. But then there is the city girl’s impatience with all that. “You’re only confused because you’re refusing to take a hint,” Shannon is told by her friend. “What do you think about coming to our place and letting Jesse spank you whenever you get horny?”

After which, of course, there is simply more spanking. Lots of it.