$14.95
ISBN 1573441899
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(06/09/04)
Summer's not about delayed gratification. Summer's about right here and right now. Balconies, beaches, patios, pools -- any place is the right place and any time's the right time. Windows are wide open. Modesty's not an option. You're too hot for clothes and too sweaty for deodorant. Sweat, surf, suntan lotion, sprinklers, spritzers -- it's all about fluids: being engulfed, engorged, sticky, soaked, saturated, swept away.
If the mercury hasn't already popped out the top of your thermometer, veteran erotica novelist, short story writer, and editor Alison Tyler (Bad Girl, Bondage on a Budget, and many more) has rounded up a cadre of talented authors to pet your sweaty things until you've melted into a small, but highly satisfied puddle. Their nineteen brief, get-right-down-to-business tales are just the ticket for brain-fried beach reading when trying to digest anything heavy is out of the question.
Heat Wave is bookended by a pair of lovely sketches. In "Amy's Tattoo," Clean Sheets' Assistant Fiction Editor Shanna Germain leads off with a voyeuristic account of a woman obsessed. There's a particular tattoo she'd love to lick and its owner, her platonic roommate doing some provocative sunbathing, seems to be pulling down her bikini bottom to flaunt it. On the back end, Tyler's "Girls of Summer" high school heroine ignores the beach beefcake to rhapsodize about her affair with an older man, a bad man: "I lived to go down on my knees in front of him and unbutton his fly with my teeth the way any good little slut should...High school boys would never, ever have you call them 'Daddy.'"
You can always count on the inimitable M. Christian for something completely different. While any of Tyler's writers are eminently capable of getting you off, Christian's the only one who makes you cry. In his bittersweet "The Waters of Biscayne Bay," a man takes a final trip with the love of his life, who is both there and not there. Watch the amazing changes he rings on the meaningless sentence, "Gail wore clothes;" and how he burns her character into your head with a single idiosyncratic act: "Taking aim, with her tongue stuck out in concentration, she'd shoot the thing at a distant doorknob, like some kind of double-D rubber band."
Summer's not the time to take yourself too seriously, as Tom Piccirilli proves in "Double-Click to Enter," a low comedy lust fest involving a Grade Z screenwriter, his exhibitionistic married next door neighbor, and her entrepreneurial use of a Web cam. In between brainstorming his latest hentai-ripoff script with his producer ("Maybe instead of Zypho's tentacles going up the chick's nose to suck out her brain, he sends them up her pussy to drain out the vaginal juices to...ah...fuel his ship."), he notices the "personal videos" offer on her Web site.
Ironic self-awareness gives several of these stories a witty edge. "The dark-haired beauty moved with the sureness of someone who had done the job countless times and had it down to a science," observes JT Langdon in "Beating the Heat." She's talking about pool cleaning, but you know that's not the only thing the beauty has down to a science. And Langdon could be talking about herself writing the sex scene, too. She wouldn't be bragging -- her porn chops are that deft: "...swirling her tongue between the puffy red folds to get at the bud of flesh that was Connie's swollen clit."
Langdon's hardly the only Heat Wave writer to describe timeless activities involving favorite body parts with a fresh spin. Thomas S. Roche's "Tan Lines" explores the anthology's public sex sub-theme on a deserted restaurant patio during a San Francisco heat wave: "Anyone with an educated ear would have heard what it was: a badly stifled, barely controlled squeal of feminine orgasm." Helena Settimana's well-set second-person "Highway 69" eschews the beach scene for a cabin deep in the north woods. Well-wrought similes enhance a brief, passionate reunion: "the creak of a dock like a cheap hotel bed...your pussy throbs with desire and abuse...prodding the pucker, feeling it yield...levering his stiff peg by fractions into your tight bottom."
Savannah Stephens Smith's "In Dependence Day" revels in one of Tyler's trademarks, a dominant/submissive relationship minus the hardware this time. "The throbbing between my legs is intolerable. I can't put my fingers down there; I dare not until allowed." Anyone who wants to write erotica should study Smith's stylish, graceful prose for the power and rhythm she produces out of one-syllable words and simple phrases.
The most literary piece and one of the very few to offer any man-on-man action, though fleeting, is Maxim Jakubowski's "What I Did on My Holidays." Continuing in the voyeur/exhibitionist vein, an "I'll do anything" offer results in a man arranging for his woman to be fucked by a well-endowed stranger while he watches: "He attacked her with unceasing force, burying himself inside her flesh with every in and out piston movement, metronomically regular and untiring, his large heavy balls slapping against her pale arse cheeks."
Summer's about going with the flow: offering it, asking for it, taking it, giving it up, burning some memories to last you through those long winter nights. If you can't get any cooler, there's only one thing to do. Get hotter.
