Celestial Reviews 159 - February 19, 1997
Note: I tried to post this through AOL, and they put it on the Newsgroup
INCORRECTLY three - count 'em - THREE times - not one of them correct.
Eli (of alt.sex.stories.moderated) has been kind enough to offer to
repost it for me, and so I'll simply send this to him and ask him to
repost it. I regret the delays this causes. It seems that AOL is so
hung up on fixing its overload problem that the organization is ignoring
this other problem. Please continue sending correspondence to me at
celeste801@aol.com.
Second Note: Thanks to the help of a correspondent, I have rebuilt my
database of stories and should be able to resume my regular review
pattern.
Third Note: I reviewed several "leftover seasonal stories" this week -
specifically Christmas and Velentine's stories.
Final Note: Remember that the authors of these stories may like to hear
a word or two from you.
- Celeste
"Radhika and Matthew" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (cross-cultural
romance) 10, 9, 9
"Dialogue" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (hot flirtation) 10, 9, 9
"Teen Breeder" by ucclear (beating & impregnation) 7, 5, 3
"Christmas Tale" by Frank Ashby (hedonistic reunion) 9, 10, 10
"Stuck by Cupid" by Hotdog (fun-filled rape) 6, 5, 4
"Christmas Carol" by Mark E. Dassad (teen gangbang) 5, 9, 8
"Take 2" by Gregarious (blind date) 8, 9, 9
"Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt" by Day Dreamer
(emerging adolescence) 9, 9.5, 9.5
"Robin" by Mark Aster (moral dilemma) 10, 10, 10
"Robin and Kestrel" by Robin Man (bb superhero sex) 9, 9, 9
"The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale" by Milford Whittemore (fairy
tale without sex) 9, 5, 5
"Change of Pace" by Mike Allegretto and Caitlin B. (sci fi TG)
8, 10, 10
"Radhika and Matthew" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (mohanraj@mills.edu). This
is a brief but well-written story about an intercultural romance. It
contains no vivid sex scenes, and I suppose the main reason for
including it in this newsgroup is because it is written by an author who
has written so many vivid sex scenes.
This is the sort of story after which I had to stop and think about what
really happened. As I neared the end, I said to myself, "This isn't
really making sense." When I read the last line, I said, "This makes NO
sense." Then I glanced back through the story and said, "Oh, yeah! I
get it. Now it makes perfect sense."
Ratings for "Radhika and Matthew"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
"Dialogue" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (mohanraj@mills.edu). No actual sex
takes place in this very short story. The man and woman just make
plans, but they are very hot plans.
Ratings for "Dialogue"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
"Teen Breeder" by ucclear (ucclear@inetworld.net). The girl thinks her
mom is wonderful but her father is a jerk. When the daughter walks past
the bedroom, she sees the father cruelly beating her mother with a belt,
and this gives the girl her first orgasm. The old man's job is
threatened, and Mom figures he can hang onto it by letting the new boss
fuck their daughter. Since the boss wants to have children by as many
women as possible, the mother arranges for the daughter to take
fertility drugs. They date and have sex. Before the second date Dad
beats the girl and then goes out with the guys; then Mom serves the boss
a good meal; and then Mom stands by the parental bed and occasionally
beats the daughter while the boss has sex with the kid during her most
fertile period. Knowing how fertile she is, the girl can't help but have
a major orgasm. After the boss leaves, Mom beats the girl some more, so
that she'll have some more orgasms to "soak it up" and make sure the kid
gets pregnant.
I guess there are some sexy parts to this story. Mostly, however, it's
pretty silly. I really don't think there are many normal girls who
would respond this way to this kind of abuse, and there's no sensible
explanation for her abnormality.
Ratings for "Teen Breeder"
Athena (technical quality): 7
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 3
"Christmas Tale" by Frank Ashby. Frank and Gladys are hedonists. I
know this because instead of going to church on Sunday, they stay at
home and fuck; and before the third enfuckment they discuss swinging,
and Gladys gets so turned on that she's eager to take it up the ass. By
this I don't mean they are irreligious: the church people probably
preferred that they stay at home, since they would have been distracted
by all that fucking, especially the anal part, and especially if the
sermon was boring or the choir was off key. Anyway, Frank and Gladys
sponsor a sort of secular version of the Waltons' Homecoming or
Gathering or whatever their Christmas special was called.
The participants in the reunion are fairly normal people whose value
systems and lifestyles differ somewhat from my own. I would say that
they are like folks next door, but the folks next door to me go to
church every Sunday, and I think they shudder at the very notion of anal
sex. The story is big on incest, but it's not the exploitive type of
incest that many readers find to be distasteful.
The story is told by the participants themselves, as they remember it.
There are four different parts, each told from a different perspective;
and the details of their stories do not always agree. This is an
interesting approach: the same incident can be remembered differently by
different people, because nobody sees the whole picture. Each person
sees only that part of the scene that could have been seen from his or
her perspective, and even that part may be remembered imperfectly
because of emotions or subsequent activities.
The only minor weakness in the story is that it would have benefited
from a good proofreading before going to press.
Ratings for "Christmas Tale"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Stuck by Cupid" by Hotdog (hotdog@who.knows). I thought this was going
to be a Valentine's Day story, but it's not. It's a story about a horny
guy who rapes a younger girl in the shower. It's not really rape, of
course, because the girl enjoys it and decides to go steady with the
rapist.
The story has additional basic problems with verisimilitude. For
example, the narrator claims to attend a public high school that has
22,000 students, with 4000 graduating seniors. There ain't no such
place. Most states have only one or two UNIVERSITIES with that many
students. To feed that many students, the cafeteria alone would have to
be larger than any high school I have visited or heard of.
The following criticism may appear trivial, but it's not. In the first
paragraph, the narrator says, "I graduate in two weeks and have never
been laid." This is not true. He should have said. "I WAS GOING TO
graduate in two weeks and HAD never yet been laid." It makes a
difference. It's important to use verb tenses in such a way as to help
the reader understand the perspective from which the story must be read.
Ratings for "Stuck by Cupid"
Athena (technical quality): 6
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 4
"Christmas Carol" by Mark E. Dassad (Ole.Joe@poboxes.com). The narrator
is a unintelligent embodiment of high school swine who decides to take
an unattractive seventh-grader to a Christmas booze and drugs party so
that he can pop her cherry. It turns out that he shares her with a
bunch of other guys he hardly knows. The girl doesn't exactly enjoy it,
but the guy sure feels good about his contribution to society.
If it weren't for the overall illiteracy of this story, it would
possibly be a very good story. I don't think many of us would actually
recommend gang-rape like this in real life, but the story is a vivid and
realistic portrayal of a really shallow lifestyle. If it were clearly
written, the story could give us an insight into the mind of a bizarre
pervert - like many of those whom we might find in the real world today.
It's very difficult to write dialogue in such a way as to make the
characters look illiterate without letting the story itself degenerate
into benighted stupidity, and this author is not completely successful
in his endeavor. Nevertheless, I can't help suspecting that this might
be a good story, if it were cleaned up.
Ratings for "Christmas Carol"
Athena (technical quality): 5
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8
"Take 2" by Gregarious (gregtorr@ican.net). Keith gets set up on a
blind date with Elena. The date turns out to be wonderful, and so they
head straight to her apartment from the jazz club and decide to make
love. They have a major focus on doing things for the "first time"
together. It was a good, sexy first date.
Ratings for "Take 2"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
"Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt" by Day Dreamer. Because of his
mother's job, the 15-year-old narrator of this story has to stay with
Aunt Sue on Grandpa's farm just outside town. The main difficulty is
that they have only two bedrooms, and so he has to sleep with Aunt Sue
in her big double bed. Talk about a transparent plot! Actually the
situation not all that difficult: Aunt Sue is beautiful and the narrator
has a deep and abiding interest in losing his virginity as soon as
possible.
In spite of sharing the bed with his aunt, Donny is initially virtuous,
settling for simple wet dreams in which his imaginary partners look a
lot like his bed-mate. When they go swimming, they initially wear their
underwear, but it's hard to hide a hard-on in a skimpy bathing suit, and
Sue's panties, do not remain opaque when they get wet. As I said, talk
about a transparent plot! Well, opacity having been eliminated, Sue
decides that it will be OK to go skinny dipping if Donny would like to
go swimming again. Boy, would he! And remember, we mustn't tell Mom.
And, of course, there's a rule: "Everyone can look all they want, but no
handling the merchandise."
I guess if the U.S. Constitution can be amended and if the Berlin Wall
can come down, we should not be surprised that the Rules of Skinny
Dipping can change; and they do. It gets to be pretty hot stuff. The
New Rule is that touching and its concomitants should take place only in
the pool at the creek, certainly not in bed, where they sleep and have
mutual wet dreams together. Eventually the New Rule gets modified with
a simple codicil that says it will be OK for them to mutually take each
other's virginity. And maybe it would be OK to do it in bed if they
were really quiet and didn't wake Grandpa, who seems to be pretty much
deaf and senile anyway. As the song says, "Life gets complicated when
you get past fourteen...." This is a very good story.
Ratings for "Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 9.5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9.5
"Robin" by Mark Aster (MyFrThAl@aol.com). Robin first appeared with the
Allen Sisters in this author's "At the Pool". In this episode Robin is
still working as a lifeguard, and she becomes romantically involved with
another lifeguard named Jerry. What we have here is a sexy build-up to
a moral dilemma.
Ratings for "Robin"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Robin and Kestrel" by Robin Man. {This was listed as ROBIN4.TXT}. The
two 16-year-old proteges of Batman work out together and get turned on
by the physical contact. Later Batman himself frolics with the guys -
all sans costume, of course. I enjoy ff sex much more than the mm
variety, but it's easy to see that an mm fan would enjoy this, if a deep
plot were not considered to be a necessity.
Ratings for "Robin and Kestrel"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
"The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale" by Milford Whittemore
(MilfordW@worcester.net). This well-written fairy tale about an elf and
a naked princess who usually wore a chastity belt but one day went for a
walk naked in the forest has no moral and no real point. It's one of
the best pointless sex stories that's not worth reading that I have ever
read.
Ratings for "The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 5
"Change of Pace" by Mike Allegretto and Caitlin B.
(caitlinb@concentric.net). Jack is a bit of a rationalist: he doesn't
believe in magick. But his mother is a white witch, which means that
she can cast benevolent and humorous spells, like Samantha used to do on
"Bewitched." So she changes Jack into a person who looks just like
Agent Scully from the "X-Files." Actually, the transformation process
continues in several steps in 15 minute intervals until he becomes
totally female, but Mom doesn't tell him exactly what these steps are.
In addition, there are several other rules that are explained in the
story.
Since the change will be temporary (unless he requests that it be
permanent), Jack decides to play along, to enjoy it, and to make mental
notes that he can enjoy later. After all, he has lusted after the
Scully character for a long time, and soon he will be encapsulated
inside her body! There are several additional interesting twists and
turns in this story.
Chapters 1-3 were written some time ago by Mike Allegretto, and
Chapters 4-6 were drafted by Caitlin B., and finished by Caitlin B.
after feedback from Mike Allegretto. The two halves don't match up
perfectly (the pace of the second half is different from that of the
first, and the first three chapters develop at a more leisurely pace
than the last three), and some proofreading would have been in order;
but it's still a pretty good collaboration.
Ratings for "Change of Pace"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10