$21.00
ISBN 0811864022
available through Amazon

Reviewed by Sam Capps Emerson
(11/19/08)

Now here's a truly sexy holiday gift -- a book so heavy and luxurious you'll almost want to use it during sex as a prop. Maybe lay it on your lover's tummy while you read one short erotic story after another -- the weight and feel of the book will be as titillating as the stories. The book is hardcover with a teasing X cutout slipcase, almost 400 pages heavy, and has a velvety red and gold cover that announces clearly that something hot and wonderful lies within.

Once you recover from the look and feel of X: The Erotic Treasury, you'll find forty delightful stories inside. Some are collected from Susie Bright's great recently-ended Best American Erotica series, and many other stories are brand new. The book opens with R. Gay's fascinating story "Broads," which is about a man's trouble in actually meeting the broads he desires. His non-broad ex-girlfriend tells him he's just not the kind of guy that broads want, but he knows what he wants and aims to get it: "...loud, brassy women who sit with their legs open and drink beer straight from the bottle -- women who always say exactly what they're thinking and for better or worse, mean what they say." I have to admit that I wanted a broad myself by the time I finished this story.

There are many stories here that made me feel my own longing, which is the best of what erotica can do for anyone. I wanted to write about my own weird childhood sexual stirrings after reading P.S. Haven's "Rock of Ages," wherein the young man ogles his older sister and gets all of those sexual images permanently hardwired and mixed in with the rock music of the time. I definitely wanted my own "Wish Girls" after reading Matthew Addison's story of that name, a genie-in-the-bottle vision of perfect sex...that may just not be perfect enough. And "The Man Who Ate Women"? Good heavens, I think we should make this a permanent parlor game -- blindfold a willing man and see how many women he can get off with his tongue, while still enjoying every minute of it.

There's no particular theme to this collection of stories, except for a certain level of great writing that is always in place in Susie Bright's books. Some of the well-known authors include Carol Queen, Donna George Storey, and Tsaurah Litzky, along with the Clean Sheets editorial triple-threat of Bill Noble, Shanna Germain, and Susannah Indigo. But the X-marked theme of a "treasury" of stories is quite fitting, since this book should definitely sit on the headboard, waiting for a lover to pick it up and reread a story at any time. I think I'll start tonight, pick something short and sweet and completely new, like Chelsea Summers' "Cold Ass Ice" that begins like this:

Step outside and it feels as if you've entered a hot, wet oven. You're the pat of butter on the baked potato that is Gotham. It's hot, hot, heat, wet and hot, and it cleaves to you, sweat pressing your skin and enervating you with its doughy-moist succubus embrace. You need to go somewhere the sun don't shine. You need to find your place in the shade. You need to embrace your inner Arctic. You need to stick an ice cube up your ass...

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