Title: Three the Hard Way Author: Susie Bright, Editor Publisher: Touchstone Press Publish Date: 2004 Pages: 231 Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

In her introduction, editor Susie Bright talks about pornography's place in literature today. She mentions the premium most readers, writers and publishers of porn put on brevity, and how that is changing. She argues that an erotic writer can do more than slap a setting and screw on the page. In Three The Hard Way, Susie Bright collects erotic novellas from three writers that demonstrate her point. In the scope of a novella, an author can lay down real characters, ask and answer questions that would have no place in a short story, and create plots that have tension and importance. There is also room for plenty of sex, of course.

The first novella, "The Motion of the Ocean," by Tsaura Litzky, is a fictional memoir. Each chapter shows the narrator at a different stage in her sexual life - the action skips from the crazy happenings at her brother's Bar Mitzvah to her first love and subsequent betrayal to the fears and excitements of growing old. Litzky's protagonist is sympathetic, and her adventures both realistic and hot, but the story didn't do it for me. It's too much of a jumble, and the supporting characters - usually male and naked - don't hold up well. I think Litzky writes about important subjects, and with a real passion for sex and also love, but there's not enough in the way of plot and character to really hold the reader.

The Widow, by Greg Boyd, is something else altogether. The story centers around a husband coming across a piece of erotica that his wife is writing in secret. As he reads it, he finds out more about her fantasies than he could have imagined or wanted to imagine. Boyd uses an unusual and I think effective device to tell the story- he splits each page in two. At the top is the wife's story, a simple plot of a widowed woman who eventually finds herself in a dark and strange erotic adventure. At the bottom of the page, almost as a footnote, is the author's husband, telling the story of his marriage, and his reactions as he reads his wife's book. While the form is at first a little distracting, in terms of turning pages back and forth, Boyd keeps the tension high in both narratives, with coinciding twists and climaxes. The sex is quite hot, and the ending is satisfying. The writing in both sides of the narrative is a little stiff, but it's a fun, clever story.

The final section of the book is William Harrison's Shadow of a Man. In this strange and provocative novella, Harrison really shows what erotica can be at its best. A semi-famous, semi-cynical photographer, Cal, comes to South Africa to take the portrait of a retired general, and becomes involved with his subject's daughter, Ellen. She's quiet, genteel, and interested only in role-playing in bed. Cal starts to shed his cynicism as he learns more and more about his lover, and about the politics that haunt Apartheid South Africa. The connection between sex and fear becomes a powerful theme, and makes for a tense, involved read. The characters shed their superficiality, and Cal feels himself changing in the atmosphere of his growing attachment to the dangerous Ellen. This was the best story in the collection, and it would stand up as a non-pornographic piece.

Susie Bright did a good thing in putting together this collection. There's a lot of potential in erotic writing. While the novellas in Three The Hard Way are sometimes rough, it's clear that the authors- all of them- are doing a hard and necessary thing in writing them. The more ambitious porn becomes, the better it is for the readers.