$14.95
ISBN 1576121836
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(03/12/03)
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad...she was better.
Good girls go to heaven;
Bad girls go everywhere.
What makes a girl bad? She dances with darkness -- danger is her aphrodisiac of choice. Her favorite kind of sex is the unexpected. Amsterdam bores her because nothing is taboo there. And she knows just how to please a woman.
What does a bad girl do? Everything and with everybody. She plays Daddy games with her boyfriend. If he wants her bare down there, she shaves him in return. Bent over the sink in a public restroom, she fucks a handsome stranger. She binds her breasts and puts on drag to cruise the men-only street in Hamburg's red-light district. She asks her girlfriend to spank her as a dress-rehearsal for a session with the mistress she both wants and fears.
Alison Tyler has gathered the highlights of a decade's worth of her published erotica into a single volume that's down and dirty and proud of it. The two dozen brief tales are the literary equivalent of quickies, scenes rather than stories, desserts rather than main courses, but as desserts go, they're luscious confections, and who doesn't love the breathless excitement of realizing you're going to get what you need right here, right now?
The predominantly first-person voice puts you inside a bad girl's mind. Sensory details make you see what she sees, smell what she smells, taste what she tastes (or maybe that should be "whom"):
"She had chameleon eyes, now green, now blue, now grey...deep within them, I saw the spirals of black."
"It doesn't actually look like a penis. Too smooth. Too perfectly rocket-shaped. Too sapphire blue."
"My first memory of you is popcorn-scented. Popcorn-scented and Mad-Max-infused."
"Danielle's pussy tasted slightly of the perfumed soap she used, combined with the fragrance of baby powder, a pale, talcum scent."
"I savor the flavor, a combination now of the strong tea and the hot-summertime taste of my boyfriend's naked skin."
Tyler's bad girl gets it on primarily with other bad girls, though bad boys are featured in a few of the encounters. She has a penchant for sixty-nine, ass play, and strap-ons. Bondage and discipline are two of her favorite things. "Bite me even harder," she implores. Pain, when dispensed with expert precision by an empathetic partner, is her friend: "I wanted it, so it hurt in an entirely different way than any other type of pain."
"Blue Sky Sideways," one of the longer, more fully-realized offerings, employs an inventive point-of-view as the narrator, bound on her belly to a bed and awaiting her Mistress's return, addresses an imaginary witness, a novice who's trying to understand her addiction to the rush of helplessness, the promise of punishment. This one's especially well-told, convincing, and passionate. However, a safety note is called for. Though a popular fantasy, being left alone in bondage is very dangerous in reality. Don't try this at home.
"Andrew and the Blade" works in one of the few male points of view. In the story-within-the-story, a lover she picks up in a bar tells the bad girl about a previous girlfriend who tied him down, blindfolded him, and made him guess the identity of various objects with which she was stroking his rampant cock. The fear-factor-mind-fuck finale to his recollection gets their minds racing and their blood rushing below.
In "The Sex Test," Tyler's at her inventive best. The bad girl's been given a batch of fashion magazines by her best friend Roxanne. In the stack is a Cosmo-style publication with one of those "Rate Your Libido" multiple-choice tests. It seems that Roxanne's already filled it out. Curiosity overcoming her voyeuristic guilt, the bad girl learns some things about Roxanne that she never suspected.
Deftly drawn, highly accessible, a dizzying kaleidoscope of sensuality, Tyler's work should push the buttons of every reader who's ever felt the stirrings of her inner bad girl or who's been dying to meet one.
