Title: Frenzy: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex Author: Edited by Alison Tyler Publisher: Cleis Press Publish Date: 2008 Pages: 209 Genres:: Fiction, Compilation, Fantasy, Fetishes Reviewer: J. Arathoon

Rating:

Sometimes you just need a quickie. Frenzy: 60 Stories Of Sudden Sex is just the book for the person who needs a shot of spice in a hurry. Every story is 1,500 words or under, and some are barely more than a paragraph; no story takes more than a couple minutes to read. Because there are so many stories jammed into this book, they are able to cover a broad spectrum of topics. There are tales of straight sex, gay sex, lesbian sex; cross dressing, dominance, longstanding love, anonymous lust. Some have complete story arcs, while others are just a description of a highly charged erotic moment. People get it on on ski lifts and trains, in junkyard forges, cars, meadows and dance clubs—and they all do it in four pages or less.

The thing that ties the disparate stories together is that they are all, almost without exception, beautifully written. This collection isn’t for the faint of heart; a lot of the stories deal with dominance or power play in one form or another, and most of them are steaming hot and extremely explicit. But there are moments of exquisite language and of great writing, like when Mary Borsellino writes on p. 39: “The thing about alley cats is that they learn better than to let anyone pick them up and love them. That’s their triumph; that’s their tragedy. It keeps them alive and keeps them from living.” As the set up for a story about a man's emotionally distant lover, it's a great metaphor.

A few particulars: Although there are a fair number of lesbian-themed stories, there are only a couple stories of gay sex. There isn’t much in the way of threesomes, and there are at least two stories I would personally have left out, “Waves” and “The Heist,” both of which have endings that leave a sour taste in the mouth. There also seems to be an unnaturally high proportion of stories that focus around food as a metaphor for sex, which can get tedious.

However, the beauty of a collection of stories as short as these is, if you don’t like one, it’s over before you have a chance to say “not my bag,” and you’re on to the next tale of delight and debauchery. In any collection of this many stories there are bound to be some that don’t appeal to you; but at least these are all written well enough that they won’t offend your aesthetic, even if they don’t interest you personally.