$24.95
ISBN 1885865414
available through Amazon

Reviewed by William Dean
(01/15/03)

I have several friends who live or have lived in New Orleans. Maybe it's the scintillating aroma of fresh beignets wafting up among the ornate iron railings or the heat still rising from the legendary Storyville brothels, the sensual mix of Cajun and Creole, French and Spanish cultures, the mysterious hints of gris-gris and Voodoo and the nearby bayous that give the natives a sexy aura. Whatever it may be -- and probably a combination of all of these things -- New Orleans, or Nawlins or The Big Easy, is an erotic, steamy, more Old World city than the rest of America. That charm, that strangeness, that fun-loving sexuality is captured by Jamie Joy Gatto in a new collection of erotic fiction titled Sex Noir.

You buck and you groan, your body begs me to take it further. With one light touch of my comb, I barely make contact with your clit. It sparks a thousand volts inside you from your groin, up your torso, inside your belly. It spreads to your fingertips and limbs, finally flushing your face beading up with sweat. As you come, the transformation begins; our conjugal bed starts to glimmer, then shine, self-illuminating. Upon it, you glow like seraphim, a hundred points of angel light; your aura floods the room.

There are emergent themes, or perhaps fetishes, that haunt Jamie Joy's stories: domination and submission, the fall and tumble of hair, the play of light and shadow, the scents of love and love-making, the responses of bared skin, the animalistic hungers and passions, the losing and regaining of self amidst pleasures. She -- sometimes starkly, sometimes with a lingering caress -- writes passages that invade your mind, ripple down your senses and take you back to a more simple and primitive self wherein the daily rigors fade and the jungle-like passions stalk forth in the night.

It is her gift -- or skill -- to make you simultaneously forget and remember; forget that you are not the character in the tale, remember your own erotic urgings and wants and how they have been satisfied. There is a darkness pervading all the stories, but it is an enveloping kind that does not frighten but caresses and makes you gasp without suffocating. Hidden here, too, is something often lacking in erotic fiction: liberation, the freedom to simply enjoy and be carried away. At least for awhile.

My hair brushed his belly as I moved to taste it. He took my head between his hands. "Please," he whispered, "just touch me." My fingers drew pictures across his chest, up his neck, dove into his scalp; his hair responded with rippling fluidity. He withdrew my hands, grabbed me by the wrists, "Touch me," he begged, "My skin. All over."

There are eighteen stories -- some quite brief -- in Sex Noir, each evoking another facet, another seductive glimpse into the author, the reader, and into that special place which is called New Orleans.

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