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From: Celeste801@aol.com
Subject: Celestial Reviews 208 - Aug 16
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Celestial Reviews 208 - August 16, 1997
Note: An 8 year old boy walks home from school, each day passing an 8 year
old girl's house. One day as he is passing by carrying a football, he can't
resist taunting the girl. He holds up the football and says, "See this
football? Football is a boys' game, and only boys can have a football." The
little girl runs into the house and cries to her mother, "I want a football.
" Being a woman of the 90s, her mother goes out and gets her one.
The next day the girl is waiting for the little boy, as he rides up on his
bike. She holds up the football and says, "Nah Nah Nah Nah". The little boy
angrily points to his bike and says, "Oh yeah, well this is a boy's bike, and
only boys get boy's bikes, and you can't have one." She runs into the house
for her mom.
The next day the little girl is waiting for the boy on her new boy's bike.
The little boy gets furious and pulls down his pants; and pointing to dick,
says "Look; only boys have these, and your mom can't buy you one!"
The next day he walks by and says, "Well, I guess I showed you!" She promptly
pulls up her dress, points to her pussy, and proclaims, "My mother tells me
that as long as I have one of these, I can have as many of THOSE as I want!"
Final note: Remember: even though someone else may be posting my reviews for
me, my e-mail address is still Celeste801@aol.com.
- Celeste
"And Then I Fucked Her" by Mike Hunt (very sexy humor)
10, 10, 10
"Parking with Jennifer" by Mr E (makw15@dial.pipex.com)
"Love, Insecurity, and Contentment" by The Lovers
(romantic interlude) 8, 5, 5
"Moonlight Again" by Mark Aster (romantic moonlight sex)
10, 10, 10
"Owning Corey" by Don Boettger (sex slavery) 10, 10, 10
"Slumber Party" by Amy and Larry (teen orgy with baby-sitter)
9, 9, 9
Guest Reviews:
"I Dream Of Jeanniequin" by Robotdoll (robotic sitcom
parody) 9, 7, 6
"The Master's Ring" by ElSol (secret sex society) 8, 7, 5
"Billy F" by Jessica W. (voyeurism) 8, 5, 6
"The Hunger" by Story Master (male dominance) 8, 7, 4
Reposted Reviews:
* "The Bet" by John Carter (betting on bdsm) 9.5, 10, 10
"And Then I Fucked Her" by Mike Hunt (MrM1ke@aol.com). Fucking Mike Hunt! I
was reading this story, and Mike was quoting Michael K. Smith's essay on "How
To Write Sex Stories Good," which is one of my favorite essays on that topic.
Then I realized that he was poking fun at Michael K.! Well, OK; humor I can
understand. So as I read on, I said to myself: "This is a really great
story! Look at all these long quotations and how well Mike Hunt has handled
the quotation marks!" This was especially gratifying, since in one of my
recent issues of CR (the one before I discussed blonds and blondes) I had
discussed quotation marks. But then he left off an end quote! I was getting
all hot and horny, and now I didn't know who the hell was talking. To top it
off, he spelled the same person both "blond" and "blonde." It was like
taking a really cold shower during an orgasm. What next? Will he "lay down
next to the blond on the bed?
{Wow! The subtle irony in that last sentence overwhelms me. Maybe I had
better explain it....}
The bad news is that this isn't really much of a story at all. The good news
is that Mike Hunt tells a good story even when he's not telling a story. And
fortunately, this non-story is really sexy. It's mostly about sex in a movie
theater and at a butcher's shop. Well, the actual story is about sex in and
around a dentist's office; but the real action takes place between the lines
- actually, above and below the lines.
I've given Mike Hunt a lot of thought, and I imagine you have too. {Some
sentences in this review don't have their full impact unless they are read
out loud, or at least loudly to one's internal audience.} In fact, I have
been suspicious about Mike Hunt's identity. I had a theory that Mark Aster
was in some way connected with Mike Hunt, because I had never seen the two of
them in one place at the same time. However, just today I found newly posted
stories by both authors, and I doubt that Mike Hunt is clever enough to use a
deliberate subterfuge to throw me off track.
I used to think that I could spot Mike Hunt's stories by their style alone.
For example, the present story uses the word "baloney" two times: once
immediately preceding "pony" and once during a conversation with a blond(e)
whom he hoped to fuck in a butcher shop. {That sentence becomes less
ambiguous if we put "in a butcher shop" right after "conversation," but I
think Mike Hunt would prefer it this way.} Anyway, that's the way Mike Hunt
would use baloney. So I know this is Mike Hunt's work.
The problem is that Mike Hunt has imitators. For example, Taria recently
published "Soft Ball," which was a story about rather than by Mike Hunt, and
yet it sounded like something that had really sprung forth from Mike Hunt.
The word "sophomoric" has been overused with regard to Mike Hunt's writing;
but my online thesaurus suggests no alternatives - just a misspelling for
"soporific," and Mike Hunt is certainly not soporific. So we'll go with
raunchy, sexy, titillating, humorous, and generally arousing.
But he uses the word "tits" only six times. Not good enough! As the Sex Nazi
said on Seinfeld, "No sex for you!"
Ratings for "And Then I Fucked Her"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Parking with Jennifer" by Mr E (makw15@dial.pipex.com). When I started this
story, I thought it was going to really suck: two spelling gaffes in the
first paragraph. It did really suck, but in a much more pleasant sense than
I had expected. This story disabuses the reader of the notion that English
girls are morally upright young ladies who are reluctant to give their
boyfriends really hot blowjobs.
Ratings for "Parking with Jennifer"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Love, Insecurity, and Contentment" by The Lovers (lovers@unforgettable.com).
Two people whose exact relationship is unspecified are visiting Quebec City
and then making love in a hotel room there. This story is seriously
disrupted by the second person (you) point of view. In addition, the author
somehow fails to draw an effective word-picture. It's nice that the man
cares so much about the woman's feelings, but the existential angst and lack
of action at times slow the story to a crawl. I think this is probably a
very hot story for the person ("you") to whom it is directed; but it needs
serious revamping to appeal to me as an outsider.
This same author recently posted a poem entitled "Lovemaking," which I
consider to work much better as a poem than this effort does as a short
story. But I don't want to get into reviewing poetry here....
Ratings for "Love, Insecurity, and Contentment"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 5
"Moonlight Again" by Mark Aster (MyFrThAl@aol.com). The Allen sisters have
been on hiatus. It's good to see them back again. There's not much I can
say about this story, except that I found it to be extremely romantic and
sexy. Our Hero makes tender love in the moonlight to one of the Allen
sisters while the twin babies are asleep in their bedroom and while the other
sister is reading in the living room. Like I said, it's romantic and sexy;
but you'll have to read the story to verify this.
Ratings for "Moonlight Again"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Owning Corey" by Don Boettger (dbetger@tiac.net). The narrator is
conducting business with a man who gives him the services of a sex slave for
the night. The narrator is repulsed by the owner's cruel treatment of the
girl, and so he arranges to have her released to him as part of the business
negotiations. In effect, he becomes her new owner; but his desire is to set
her free. The complicating factor is that Corey does not want to be free:
being a sex slave is really the only way of life she can remember.
This is sort of a reverse-slavery story: "If you want to be a slave, and your
partner knows your limits and respects them, that's cool. But to coerce you,
and twist your guilt and shame against you, and work mind games -- that's
truly evil." The story presents and interesting problem: how possible is it
to enable a woman who has viewed herself as a sextoy to move from that
perspective to one where she views herself as a worthwhile person who can
freely give and receive love from a person she chooses? The author explores
this question in an extremely creative manner.
Ratings for "Owning Corey"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Slumber Party" by Amy and Larry (critic@anon.nymserver.com). Bob goes over
to the house of his neighbor Joan to baby-sit for her daughter Amy's slumber
party. Of course, when the teenage girls play strip porker - er, poker -
they ask Bob to join them, and he has trouble concentrating - on his cards,
that is. Of course, when the girls invite him to join them for an orgy after
the game, he realizes that his would be illegal and that he could go to
prison, and then he agrees to fuck the whole bunch. Actually the rules are a
little more complicated than that, and one girl just wants to watch and keep
time. The kids are very polite - something you don't see too often in the
world today - calling Bob "Sir" and "Mr. Johnson" and helping him up when he
occasionally collapses from sexual exhaustion and even letting him keep their
panties. And the kicker is that Joan is so pleased with Bob as a baby-sitter
that she throws a little ass his way to convince him to baby-sit for Amy
again while she goes out of town for a business seminar.
Ratings for "Slumber Party"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
"I Dream Of Jeanniequin" by Robotdoll (none@the.moment). Guest review by Kim.
That Celeste sure is a harsh taskmistress (but that's another story): no
sooner do I finish one review when another drops on to my electronic doormat.
After reading this one I will never be able to view the folk who dress shop
window dummies in quite the same way. I'm convinced Robotdoll is in this line
of work. I can just imagine her/him pondering just how are they going to work
their particular quirk into a semi-rational story. "Hmmm", they think, "I
know - magic!".
So we come to the story. It's basically Jeanie and Major Anthony Nelson, from
the old TV series "I Dream Of Jeannie," getting it on in a quite remarkably
bizarre fashion. Now married, the Major asks Jeanie on their wedding
anniversary if she would create a life size plastic replica of herself for
him to get intimate with. Quite why anyone would want to screw a plastic doll
instead of a perfectly good, and available, real woman is beyond me; but hey,
this isn't my story.
With a blink of her eyes Jeanie shrinks to tiny proportions and in her place
now stands a full size dummy wearing a wedding dress. The Major then proceeds
to strip and grope the dummy and whimper a bit. The dummy is jerkily animated
remotely by Jeanie, who for some reason is so stimulated by the sight of her
husband slobbering over a dummy that she fingers herself repeatedly to
orgasm.
The action then moves to the bedroom where the Major has stripped the dummy
and is proceeding to bite down on her plastic tits. This in turn so
overwhelms Jeanie that she accidentally blinks herself into the dummy,
becoming a sort of hybrid rigid plastic human. Some more fucking and sucking
ensues to the benefit of all concerned.
After it's all over, the Major has to squish the dummies eyes for her as she
is now unable to blink for herself. This part was actually quite interesting,
as it briefly touched on the dilemma of having vast magical power and yet
being a total submissive. Which is something I've never understood myself
about the original show. If I had Jeannie's powers then I sure as hell
wouldn't be ass-kissing to some dumb Major; I'd be out there ruling the world
<heh heh heh>... er sorry about that, got carried away for a moment.
So, did I like the story? Hmmm, not sure. It certainly opened my eyes to yet
another quirk of human sexuality. It's well enough written; but I'm sorry, I
just can't bring myself to imagine Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden
masturbating. It's a bit like trying to imagine the Queen of England going
for a dump - it just doesn't happen does it? (Somebody has just told me it
should be the Queen of Britain, but you knew who I meant anyway didn't you?).
Ratings for "I Dream Of Jeanniequin"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 7
Kim (appeal to reviewer): 6 (not my cup of tea - but I liked
its weirdness)
"The Master's Ring" by ElSol. Guest review by Mike Hunt.
Not that you give a shit, but when a long story starts out "This is Part
1-3", I usually just close it back up. It's the 90's. I don't have time for
Part 3. And not that you give a shit, but I don't generally bother with
stories about Masters and Doms and Subs, because it's not how my world works.
I know it does for others, but I also know people who swear that Jesus is
landing in a flying saucer next Tuesday, and I don't pay much attention to
them either.
So maybe I'm a bad person to review this story. But I saw Anne747 review a
rape story a couple weeks ago, and if she can do that, shit, I'll try
something out of my realm too. The recent Quin inspired controversy about
reviewers' personal prejudices notwithstanding, and with these reviewer's
disclosures noted, here we go. (Shit, now I'm doing disclaimers for reviews!)
The Master's Ring has parts which I totally enjoyed, and portions which
induced severe eyelid droop. The sex scenes were quite excellent, slow and
delicious, teasing and tantalizing, just the way I like them. The longish
parts in between left me cold. And the absurdity of some of the situations
made the whole thing unbelievable.
In one scene the campus priss comes to the hero's dorm room and masturbates
by humping the bed while watching "Bambi". Our hero sits next to her and
pretends not to notice. Oh, and our hero's roommate is in the room, and he
doesn't notice either. OK.
The "mystery", which wasn't much of a mystery, revolves around the
protagonist's incipient induction into a secret society, which the members
keep secret by wearing big gaudy rings that attract everyone's attention.
See, there are only 22,000 members of this society in the whole world, making
1 out of every 250,000 people on the planet a member. Luckily there are at
least four members on this college campus alone!
Well, I could go on being snide and sarcastic, and I probably shouldn't. The
story is not badly written, although for the life of me I can't understand
why it's so fucking hard for writers to run the spell check once before they
post something. And as I say, the sex scenes are quite enjoyable. As for the
rest of it, well, I just don't get it.
Ratings for "The Master's Ring"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 7
Mikeus (appeal to reviewer): 5
"Billy F" by Jessica W. (jessika15f@aol.com). Guest review by Bookman.
The story line to "Billy F" is pretty straightforward. The late-teen female
narrator gets too drunk at a party to leave, and slips into a bed upstairs to
sleep it off. The eponymous Billy (someone, of course, for whom she's lusted
for years) gets into a drunken fight with his regular girlfriend and comes on
to our protagonist. Their tryst is interrupted when the equally soused
girlfriend returns, and our narrator gets to watch the two of them screw for,
by the clock, an hour and eight minutes. Morning comes, narrator walks out,
vignette over.
The author dubs this a true story, and it has one of the attributes of truth,
in that the scale of importance enclosed in the events told is pretty small.
That's not in itself a fault; there are some very finely crafted short
stories that deal with minuscule events and still hang in the memory like the
tone from a silver bell. This, unfortunately, is not one of them.
One of the axioms of storytelling is, "show, don't tell". That is, don't
tell us, for example, that 'so-and-so was evil'. Show us his acts, or,
better yet, take us into his mind, and let us see his evil for ourselves. In
writing erotica (and this for your class, Celeste), the axiom becomes
paramount. We don't want to be told that someone's having a good time, or
that something feels good. We want to be taken into their minds, hearts, and
bodies, and feel with them what they feel. Let us feel with them, and make
up our own minds as to the meaning of what we've/they've experienced. That
way, we take the experience into ourselves and it becomes personal. (Friar
Dave and Ken Nestle are experts at this, which is one reason why their
stories are favorites year after year.)
The difficulty with "Billy F" is that, except for the brief moment before
girlfriend arrives, we're observers to the entire incident. We're outside
and disconnected. Even when the narrator masturbates along with the coupling
couple, it's still almost an aside. There's no visceral connection.
One more problem with "true" stories. If the storyteller truly lived it,
they're almost always compelled to tell it just the way it really happened
(or the way they remember it happening). The memory has an emotional
investment for them, an intrinsic importance. It has no such importance to
the reader. I could tell you a lot of stories, and I guarantee every single
one of them really happened to me. I can also guarantee you'd be bored to
death in 30 seconds. Truth has no intrinsic value of interest, in fact, it's
often the other way around. I remember a movie that started with the words,
"The following story is true. Only events have been changed to make it a
better story." And that is the storyteller's art. By all means, if you've
got an interesting true story, tell it. But tell it in such a way that we
get past the truth of the story and get to the Truth *in* the Story.
There aren't a whole lot of typos and misspellings, but enough to rob "Billy
F" of much of whatever interest it has.
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot and character): 5
Bookman (appeal to reviewer): 6
"The Hunger" by Story Master (velvet@znet.com). Guest review by BillyG.
"The Hunger" can best be characterized as an extreme non-consensual,
anti-feminist, science-fiction scenario. It's a bit difficult to regard "The
Hunger" as a story; for aside from the cameo appearance of four two-
dimensional men at the outset, there are no protagonists. There's just a
scenario that has a bare-bones beginning and no real ending.
In brief, an extremely contagious virus is purposely let loose by these four
faceless men to spread over the entire world. This virus is a man-made
invention that changes women's basic physiological functioning, making all of
them over the age of five extremely hungry for a man's sperm, even dependent
on that fluid for their lives. If they go more than 72 hours without their
supply of semen, they die a horrible death, fortunately not described.
As we might expect, this virus serves to enslave the entire female population
to men. Women lose their freedom and all their fundamental rights. Laws
governing child molestation and incest are thrown out as moot. However,
killing a woman, while not punishable, is considered bad form. Actually, the
expression employed was "unrefined behavior." This little fact is a
throw-away line to assure you that men aren't all bad. <Groan>
The technical and grammatical aspects of the story are good, but even if I
liked non-consensual stories, I'd have to fault this one as being superficial
and lacking identifiable characters and a plot. As erotica it falls flat on
its face. There is no titillating or scintillating aspects to it. There's
no sensuousness or real sexuality in this story and certainly no tenderness
or love to be found. The last half of the narrative reads like a government
report, and that doesn't give this reviewer a woodie, I assure you.
Ratings for "The Hunger"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 7
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 4
* "The Bet" by John Carter (jvogel@DGS.dgsys.com). The story begins with the
woman bound in the bed with her legs apart. Near the bed is a chest with a
combination lock. The bet is that the husband cannot get her to tell him the
combination to the lock. The husband is allowed to do anything that won't
leave a mark, with the understanding that whatever he does can't have as it's
basic purpose causing pain. He can swat her ass, but only as part of
something else, not to cause her to disclose the combination because of the
pain. His theory is that he can make her come so much that she'll do
anything to get him to stop.
This is my kind of bondage!
Ratings for "The Bet"
Athena (technical quality): 9.5
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
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