The Raunch Review: Fuck Sticks (Book 6)

Violet Malice

Violet Malice has been sweating like an Alsatian in a chip pan fire, so that you can find ruddy bloody good reads. She has been loitering between patches of shade and licking way too many Feasts (the ice cream variety). Dedicated to finding a bedtime read that kicks like a sawn off and hoses down the steaming nag after it throws its shoes off during the final furlong. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that hairy question: can a good book ever be as delicate as a good fuck?

Edition 69
Edition 69

Book title: Edition 69
Authors: Jindřich Štyrský, Vítězslav Nezval, František Halas
First published: 1931
Translator: Jed Slast

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A collection of English translations of three Czech masters of erotic literature (and members of the surrealist movement). The stories and poems were originally published in the 1930s in a six volume imprint called Edition 69 (the print run was only 69 copies and 69 is the best number yeah) launched by Jindřich Štyrský. The series was of very limited run and never available for sale. Copies were distributed only to friends and collectors due to the extreme nature of the content! Think seXXXually explicit photomontage with images sourced from German and French pornography plus some of the best fucking poetry ever written.

This edition, published by Twisted Spoon Press in 2020, features a selection of erotic writing by Štyrský, Nezval, and Halas, as well as Štyrský’s artwork and an essay by psychoanalyst Bohuslav Brouk, which ends beautifully: As each person comes into the world at the end of an umbilical cord only inevitably to become dust, let us find pleasure in everything our abilities allow us. 

Sexual Nocturne by Vítězslav Nezval: A short story about a man recalling his early sexual experiences, particularly masturbating in public and his first taste of penetrative sex with a woman in a brothel.

Highlights from the text of Sexual Nocturne:

I was fifteen years old, that is, at the age a woman’s face is what a boy notices most. We want to be loved, and the eyes play the greatest role in this. Head after head insinuate themselves into our fantasies. 

I was unable to form a clear picture of what a pussy looked like. I just supposed it was a very big hole, large enough to take the willy of a fifth former. 

I said FUCK to myself over and over as I shambled along the footpaths with an unflagging erection. 

During school vacation my grandfather came for a visit and gave me a one-crown piece. I used it at the stationer’s to buy a porcelain doll with a rubber hat. It could be filled with water, and when the hat was pressed down it peed. I sent it to the object of my adoration. 

The word FUCK is diamond-hard, translucent, a classic. 

Saying the word SYPHILIS made me delirious. It was a newly illuminated word: WOMAN. 

Her hand removed my pants. I plunged into her cunt which was so unexpected and so singularly proportional. I dared not move. This was entirely different to the practiced hand under the cloak opposite the promenade. Her vagina engulfed me in a hot nonexistence. I was fucking. I was fucking and I spurted into her cunt, which itself was somehow moving like a slug.

One of Štyrský’s illustrations for Sexual Nocturne:

Thyrsos by František Halas: The book contains eleven erotic poems by Halas. Looking at the state of his metaphors, one can only assume that Mr Halas knew how to pleasure a woman. Two poems that poked me in the eye:

The Taste of Love 

To have all vulvas spread open wide
and to kiss that warm alley they harbor
to taste a thousandfold yet never plunge inside
that familiar rose splayed to your ardour

Incomparable beauty of the mons
that ancient routine has you disdainfully vexed
it isn’t love when on her breasts you lie prone
and grind her lovely flowering sex

The extended clit gently massage
take a long swig of that vaginal wine
drink until drunk on that rare vintage
more pungent in taste than any aged vine

We’re gifted a tongue not only for speech
its key unlocks delight elsewise hidden
when lubricious spasms convulse a breach
adeptly slip your fingers all the way in

Pucker your lips in the shade of her pubis
let the mucous dew her petals of rose
the touch of your lips driving her delirious
until her rapturous skin blissfully glows

To have all vulvas spread open wide
then to stay there and sleep
to taste a thousandfold yet never plunge inside
only to suckle tenderly and deep

Sound Advice

In a pussy’s sweet folds
be sure to keep in mind
next door is another hole
for your finger to find

Gently push it in good
lightly massage the breasts
and at once your waning wood
will become stiff as a mast

Emilie Comes To Me In A Dream by Jindřich Štyrský: The original colophon reads that the book “should be kept in a secure location and out of the reach of minors”. This is a story of recollection, which centres on the narrator’s obsessive memories of Emilie. Explicit memories that melt into other women in a surreal dreamscape. 

Highlights from the text of Emilie Comes To Me In A Dream:

The heavens sleep, and somewhere behind the hedge a woman sculpted from raw meat awaits you. Will you feed her ice? 

You will feel an intense fear lest they come crashing down onto the pavement, a fear similar to the pleasure you felt in childhood at your first convulsive erection and the terror you felt when your sister taught you to masturbate with her tiny alabaster hand. 

Any man who has enjoyed the salty taste of Cecil’s twat would sell his rings, friends, morals, everything to sate that monster hidden under the little pink skirt. 

I saw her sex swell and spill out from her womb, increasing in size until it overflowed the bed and extended over the floor like lava filling up my room. I quickly got up and ran from the house like a madman. I stopped in the middle of a deserted town square. When I looked back, Marta’s vulva, resembling a giant, monumental tear of unnatural colour, was surging out my window. 

Later I placed an aquarium in the window. In it I cultivated a golden-haired vulva and a magnificent penis specimen with a blue eye and delicate veins on its temples.

Two of Štyrský’s photomontages for Emilie Comes To Me In A Dream:

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list here. Buy Violet’s chapbook here.

Overall sexual content: If there is one thing in the world that I love, it is obviously… without doubt… surrealist Czechoslovakian literature! They knew how to shag up a sentence. Grab syntax and decency by the gonads and ride them roughshod all the way home.  So I already have the hook in my mouth on this one. Štyrský was the artistic partner of the phenomenal Toyen, just so you know! What ruddy bloody sort of special magic was happening in that tiny part of the world at that moment in time.

Lots of the text in this book focuses on the act of giving female pleasure. All books should obsess over this. There are a few slides into huge monstrous vulvas that want to consume everything in their path, but I suppose female sexuality can be frightening, maybe. The endless orgasms that stretch and strain into infinity. Oh the pressure.

The illustrations and art are fabulous, funny and explicit all at the same time. And as highlighted previously, were cut out with scissors from some rather racy porno mags. Glue all over the place. Up the back of the TV.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: Hot as hell. The pink rabbit’s nose was twitching.

Food for thought: And finally. To finish you off. The Czech word for fuck is mrdat, which originally meant to move back and forth, or wag.

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list to receive a free limited edition postcard: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

The Raunch Review: Book 5

Violet Malice

Violet Malice has been bogged down with another paper based diet of erotica this week. She has found herself beating faster than usual and necking fluid from the cold tap. Dedicated to finding a bedtime read that blows the windows out and requires at least two fire engines to battle the blazing mons pubis. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that dank and seedy question: can a good book ever be as honest as a good fuck?

Happiness Bastard
Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle

Book title: Happiness Bastard
Author: Kirby Doyle
First published: 1968

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: Poet Kirby Doyle’s only published novel is a stream of consciousness, much like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Written on one massive piece of paper formed of lots of normal sized pieces of paper taped together. Obviously, the published version has pages – what a bore! According to the author the book was written on a trip that “my lover post-wife and I took to New York in 1959-1960.” Kirby is, one can only assume, the narrator Tully McSwine and his girlfriend is Dolly, who is needless to say always up for it. It goes without saying that the book is very ‘Beat Generation’ so very hard to follow, there’s no real plot line and the writing certainly reflects Kirby’s own struggle around that time with drug addiction, poverty and unhappy affairs of the ticker.

Front cover: Not the original printing by Essex House sadly. A really rubbish modern edition (2020) that looks like someone/Amazon has faxed it to Pluto and then it’s been photocopied and run over by a lorry full of shit. The front and back photos of the author are so grainy you have to be about two miles away for the pixels to come together.

Title: Bloody fantastic! A massive fan of the word bastard, both visually and orally. Swear words in titles are not utilised enough in my humble opinion. Much like my previous thoughts on Bondage Trash from last week, the two words Happiness Bastard writhe against each other. Kick each other in the bollocks. Like a bleach blonde oxymoron trying to get it on with Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Best two-word phrase/s in the book: A few to get you going:

liberal sphincter, sex heads, fat rubber, cellophaned taste, clinical pornography, genital windows, padlocked vagina, punctured prostitute, sadist cocksmen, gummy wad, electric paralysis, skin mag, urinatory fashion.

Best dialogue in the book: Like holding a mirror up to the queue in Greggs:

“Love! Ha, ha, love! I like that! Love my ass, you bastard! Why all you know of love is that it makes you twitch between your legs! Don’t talk to me of love, you walking erection!” 

“I told this idiot that I couldn’t bear it when they airbrushed the cunt away in these skin mags, and he said it wasn’t airbrushed, only shaved and her cunt was too far under to see the slit. What kind of crap is that, I ask you? Makes me wonder if this infant has ever seen a twat at all. Ha!” 

Phoning me in the middle of one icy winter afternoon to ask, “Have you any idea what Kitty’s doing right now?” and I, fearful of his hysteria and bewildered, answering, “No, what’s she doing now?” and he, like an over-intelligent schoolboy hot with the answer, “Sucking my cock, you son of a bitch… goodbye.”

“How would you like to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut?”

“I masturbate everyday. Eef I am eating a meal at night and remember that I have not masturbated I will stop my eating and masturbate then.”

Best sentence/s in the book: Some real meat on the bones here:

Dolly was the proud possessor of a remarkably elastic cunt, especially if the engagement was a particularly heated one (that is, when I was at my best). 

All of them a bunch of sexual cripples, which they will sternly prove by fucking at the drop of a political sympathy. 

Sliding the fingers of both hands into her cunt, which by this time was as easy as sliding into a bathtub full of vaseline, I could, by pulling the lips away from each other even more than the mechanics of her vaginal excitement had already done (as if I were trying to invert it), stretch her snatch out to an expansion where I could fit it over my face from eyebrows to chin like a hot meaty mask, and were it only detachable I could have marched in the Halloween parade. 

When this seismic phenomenon threatened to scatter her in bloody bits and pieces about the room I slipped my forefinger into her ass and rammed it to the knuckle… O Good Ladies and Gentle Men, need I tell you that she came neigh unto shitting all over me? 

Prance she would and tend to domestic trivialities nakedly… cook a full meal in the raw… breasts dangling over the bubbling spaghetti… the cruel lewdness of her pubic hairs level with the salad… while with a feigned tone of “modern liberality” she threw out maddening little comments: “I so think it’s wonderful not wearing clothes… so free… let the air into every little pore… so much more natural, don’t you think?” then turn and show me her buttocks as she bent to the bottom rack of the refrigerator seeking vegetables. 

She kept what she liked to think of as a secret list of ex-lovers that she sadly enjoyed showing only to people with whom she stoutly refused (I suspect out of fear of making her come) to go to bed with, like me. 

Had an applesauce sandwich for breakfast and a glass of wine too; great, cheap, vinegary wino-type wine that when you puke comes bubbl’n out yer nose and stings a bit. 

I’m not finished yet: Obviously poets make the best writers:

Dolly turned to him and milked a little snake juice from the tits of her tongue. 

A cock in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I sodomised the landlady’s cat in lieu of rent… she got her thing out of it… the landlady… not the cat…

I’ve not had such a good time since dear dead Grandma used to puke on the linoleum and let us kids skate in it. 

The girls were all very homely and intellectually aggressive in a vacuum-packed sort of a way. 

The party was boiling when we arrived, strange-looking people bulging from the windows. 

My belated old grey-haired muff of a mother used to have a in tomb in her womb. My daddy told me so. 

Buy Violet’s chapbook. One lucky person that purchases Violet’s chapbook AND signs up to the mailing list by 18th July 2022 will also receive the warm copy of Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle (see picture above, the actual copy), which includes Violet’s page markers. Winner selected at random. Mailing list sign-up here. Buy chapbook here.

Sexual content: It’s not really a sex book per say. Essex House came forward to publish it because no one else would take it on apparently. As such the sex is there but it’s not the main cut and thrust as it were. That aside, the descriptions of sex are funny rather than titillating, which is equally as enjoyable. Sex after all, should be great fun.

Given the desperate nature of the book – the drug abuse and poverty – the tone is hard and bitter tasting but jovial. The sex is tainted by an explicit hatred of women, which sees our frustrated and angry narrator sing the praises of masturbation over sexual intercourse. And later on we find him insisting that the sex will be better because he’s full of hatred. Our unhappy narrator also very much enjoys dressing women up as helplessly insatiable cum sluts. The guy is just down on life – but thankfully whilst he’s down there…

Overall conclusion: 5 out of 10.

Titillation station: Absolutely nothing stirring in the bushes. No foxes. No dogs. Not even a cormorant in a Mackintosh pushing blue marbles into a towel.

Food for thought: Shame about the writing style – stream of consciousness is a big turn off for me. It feels as though it’s close to greatness, mainly because poets that write novels understand the importance of a well crafted image, but sadly it gets lost in all the chaos and sloppy Giuseppe. The book wrestles with language – and kicks against the everyday detritus/injustice/loneliness of life – there’s a beauty in that.

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list to receive a free limited edition postcard sent via Royal Mail and that: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

The Raunch Review: Book 4

Violet Malice has been sucked inside another work of erotica this week. Like walking into a wardrobe for a fresh vest and finding yourself in a dark room in Berghain with a sex wolf sniffing at your privates. Keen to find a bedtime read that cuts the mustard and dabs it lovingly around the perineum. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that insatiable question: can a good book ever be as tactile as a good fuck?

Bondage Trash
Bondage Trash by Jon Horn

Book title: Bondage Trash
Author: Jon Horn
First published: 1968

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book presents a collection of supposedly factual documentation on a dystopian sex crazed society where nothing is off limits. There are no real plot lines, just disconnected chapters of content detailing all manner of sexual deviancy. In Part Two of the book it switches from ‘The Material’ to ‘The Dossier’ where certain extreme cases/patients are analysed and pulled apart by anonymous state-backed medical professionals. The book is dominated (pun intended) by sadomasochism, power and cruelty, almost as if this sick society is so full of hate fucks that absolutely no other feelings exist anymore.

Front cover: Some nice chains. Like it. Words like restraint, cold, hard, metal and capitalism come to mind.

Title: Probably one of the best book titles ever. Two words that twist and writhe against each other. Both things I like: bondage and trash. Certainly, the title and cover image made me want to read the book on a busy train on the underground. Holding the book proudly just below my lips to slightly obscure my lime boobtube from all the Financial Times reading professionals squeezed into their mohair business suits.

Best two-word phrase in the book: In all honesty way too many to choose from. Here are a few gems: semen crystals, goats’ rectums, unmarried gynaecologists, cornflake face, swallow girls, dream cunt, aphrodisiac cocktails, champagne fellatio, pink traffic, ambulating climax, wild scrotum, musky aphrodizzy, gonadal goo, gastric surroundings. 

Best hyphens: Pudenda-bender [the perfect precursor to my poem Tinder Bender!! which you can purchase for cold hard currency here], peeping-Tomism, fuck-and-suck, genitourinary-world-view, sex-police.

Best sentence/s in the book: Brace yourself please:

He finally confessed that he collects slices of sausage, preserves them, each slice in a glass jar, and indulges in onanistic and instructive fantasies. 

He saw a girl in a white dress spattered with mud from a passing car one day and had an erection. 

Kisses and caresses, a state of rapport; the old rich fart sans pajamas jacks off in a hat and his clique follows suit, their jackulations join like merging streams of milk of magnesia, disturbing transports showering applause on the two girls revealed now in successful and aesthetic union, auras of cunnilingual crescendo shimmering through the rainbow of the semen spray, wriggling gold limbs rippling with orgasmic spasms of fury from French aristocrats, old dowagers, hommes des lettres, and danseuses… arms and fingers grasping flesh. 

Clara appeared with her hubby on a golden leash; hubby wore falsies, was obviously crotch-bound under a flimsy and soiled bikini bottom, had a maniacal queen expression and smelled of pancake makeup and scum.

I came all over the corset-torture brochure and checked the time. 

The removal of the clitoris was ordered for all torture girls working the street by legislation proposed by the once notorious CUNT (cartel of the uninhibited nymph-tormentresses). 

The wife stared at us with haughty flashy glazed eyes, like a queen watching two monkeys doing it.

Best paragraph in the book: On our wedding night he forced a coconut custard pie into my hands without any expression of endearment and told me to throw it at his face. I complied, though puzzled, and watched him have an immediate orgasm. We were nude. I had expected thrills. But this! And then he brought out a second pie – I had wondered why he had brought two pies into our bridal suite – and, when he had wiped the pie off his face and the come off his prick, he told me to throw the second pie at his ass, and turned around. Naturally I was indignant. He slapped me, hard. So I obeyed him, and watched him come again. Then he was nice to me for a while. Later I realised he was only buttering me up for the main event: I had to lather up his chest with shaving cream, straddling and sitting on him to do it, and then I had to shave his chest slowly, while he got an erection. Then – can you believe it? – he wanted me to shit on his chest! Luckily I hadn’t taken a shit since after the wedding rehearsal the day before, so I could provide him with the biggest kick; otherwise he would have been mean, like he was on nights when I just didn’t have it for him, later on. He was always nice to me just before and just after. But what about me? I asked him. I wasn’t having any fun. This he always ignored. He never wanted to enter my body in any way, and though I disported myself quite lewdly for a while in the beginning, hoping to arouse his interest in my cunt or at least my armpit (for such were my desires), he only got itchy for pies and the chest-shit again. 

Story of my life!

♥♣♦♠Turn her inside out, buy Violet’s chapbook. One lucky person that purchases Violet’s chapbook AND signs up to the mailing list by 1st July 2022 will also receive the rare/collectable/shagged copy of Bondage Trash by Jon Horn (see picture above, the actual copy), which is still warm and includes Violet’s page markers. Winner selected at random. Mailing list sign-up here. Buy chapbook here.

Sexual content: Great writer obviously. Very very very funny. The book is a barrage of extreme sex. Disassociated, unrelenting and frenzied. A society that seems bereft of all generosity. No one seems to have fulfilling sex, and even though they climax, they are left wanting something more, something worse. However much they come together, they seem to get further and further apart. Desperation leads to an insatiable appetite to fight loneliness through the abuse of others.  So sadly the book is in no way titillating and I am sure Jon Horn didn’t intend it to be.

It goes without saying that if you want to present a sick sex fuelled society, alienating and shocking the reader are probably a good way to blow.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Glorious full-on assault of trash and dirty dirty filth. Superb book for anyone that loves literature and great funny writing.  Less so if you are in it for those lovely warm feelings or want to see S&M presented in a creamier less offensive sauce.

Titillation station: Two hander. No need for sitting on any limbs here.

Food for thought: It makes me think of a sexy Bladerunner with Harrison Ford impounding Rutger’s athletic body in some sort of medical facility to try and understand why no one has any feelings any more aside from the fleeting obliteration of orgasm. Perfect ending!

shit fuck cunt        (dies) 

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list now that’s an order: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

The Raunch Review: Erotica Book 2

Violet Malice

Violet Malice takes a second bite of the cherry. On the hunt for a HOT and STIMULATING bedtime read. Violet has consumed another work of erotica this week. As she attempts to answer that yearning question: can a good book ever be as unputdownable as a good fuck?

Erotica: Screen on top of a GB flag
Screen

Book title: Screen
Author: Barry N. Malzberg
First published: 1970

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: An everyday office pawn called Martin, who works for the New York City Welfare Department, goes to the cinema to get off. He steps right through the screen and is transformed into a film star who gets lots and lots of hot sex action. In just one weekend he finds himself married to Sophia Loren, romping with Elizabeth Taylor in a budget hotel after they escape from a half-cut Richard Burton and seduced reluctantly by Brigitte Bardot. He then decides to put it to the test: is real-life sex with an average woman better than his masturbatory escape hatch? The answer obviously (1. the author is a man; 2. who also happens to have worked in the NYC Welfare Department in real-life) is a resounding NO. The book ends with him fucking Doris Day, just so you know.

Front cover: Nice. Arty. Tits. Plus cinema ticket. (I suspect the author might like melons: a large slice of the book is focused on what you can do with a pair of tits and a match-fit tongue.)

Best two-word phrase in the book: Turgid genitals and/or directorial scrotum.

Best sentence in the book: (Please note the book is full of very very very long sentences.) And yet it does not stop there; this is Elizabeth Taylor and for her I carry on the longest sustained orgasm I have ever had in my life; far, far longer than the ten or twenty-second specials which I have managed for Sophia; it is as if the mysterious hidden triggers are blocked inside me on OPEN and I hang at the very crest of it for an incredible, for an almost frightening extension of time, feeling that because this is Elizabeth Taylor herself this time, I may literally never stop coming and my hands reach again for the remote hugeness of her breasts and I subside finally, breaking upon her, all sobs and shouts, mingled in the warm sheltering spaces of the room. 

I also very much liked some part sentences including: I tried to listen to the spang of urine in the bowl; and throw my load all the way into her. 

Sexual content: Packed with back-to-back fucking. The erotic descriptions are fantastic and funny. However, I do have a boner to pick! Our floored narrator is forever complaining about having to have sex with beautiful actresses. He paints women as horrifying sexual predators. Stunning women hideously jealous of each other. Most of the bonking he has is to placate these monsters. Obviously, this is his fantasy so he must like that sort of thing, but it does continue that worrying trend of men resenting and being threatened by women’s sexuality.

The bitterness/hatred really does jar in the end – our Martin does appear to really detest women. And like wanking. In equal measure. This is brought into sharp relief when he sets up a few out-of-office sessions with a real-life woman that also works at the NYC government department, who he cruelly describes to himself and the reader. He has sex with this 3D woman more out of boredom and because he can rather due to a genuine desire to feel someone else’s breath on his head. It is in this part of the book that the narrator betrays himself as wholegrain mustard misogynist outside the possible kink of his ruminating on Hollywood’s screen sirens.

Put a smile on her face, buy Violet’s chapbook: https://violetmalice.com/product/chapbook-tinder-bender/

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10. Fucking fantastic book. Brilliant writer of erotica. Despite the massive issues: the misogyny and the lazy fall back to weak man being hunted down by a pack of insatiable women, who just want to lie back and be fucked. Please note not all women want this. Not all women are greedy and selfish. It is not comfortable to be presented with the views of a narrator however flawed who vehemently dislikes and resents women, particularly women he finds attractive. The rules say that if you like someone, you should be nice to them.

Titillation station: Four fingered sausage roll (lubricated)

Food for thought: Finally, an interesting book given the rise in porn addiction and society’s obsession with the motion picture. Our collective loneliness and frustration. Maybe we should all give up on real-life sex. It’s much less stressful, less effort, less unpredictable and less risky to turn inwards and let the person that knows us most intimately give us exactly what we want. Ourselves. The question is how much of our sexual fantasies are within our control? Or how much cum does it take to satisfy a tractor?

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list I beg you: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

The Raunch Review: Sex Book 1

Violet Malice has decided to review erotica. Not dirty books. Erotic literature. There is a difference. Erotic literature is supposed to have some literary merit. Violet is going in search of a HOT and STIMULATING bedtime read. And will also, obviously, be assessing the level of titillation achieved, in order to answer that yearning question: can a good book ever be as exciting as a good fuck?

Used copy of book being reviewed: The Girl Beneath the Lion
The Girl Beneath the Lion

Book title: The Girl Beneath The Lion
Author: Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues
Translator: Richard Howard
First published: 1959

Back cover blurb that caught Violet’s attention: Few novelists have been able to catch the essence of a woman’s erotic impulses with quite such truth and poetic feeling, nor in a prose of such distinction. Violet’s response to this was, “yeh fucking right, we’ll just see about that.”

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A young virgin called Vanina (nice, one letter off vagina) gets all horned up on holiday in Sardinia and tells this dude who she sees staring at her on the beach to do a few things in order to eventually have it off with her in some woods one evening. She never allows him to speak, which is actually quite a good strategy to not get disappointed by someone’s personality.

Front cover: WTF? A badly photoshopped pic of some random dude. The book is about a young girl’s sexual awakening! Who in their right mind chose to represent this by putting some haughty looking middle-class looking male slapped up the front in a turtleneck. On the plus side, a shite front cover makes me more interested to know what’s under the covers. Wink. Wink. Stink. Stink.

Best two-word phrase in the book: Couldn’t decide between musky melons and faecal zone. But I do like to have my erotica caked and eaten.

Comments on the title: Our Vanina fantasizes about having sex with a lion and the general vibe is that she’s into S&M and being dominated by a violent animal/man.

Best sentence in the book: It is not absolutely necessary that he love me; it is not even indispensable that he have a soul, that he be inhabited by a kind of seagull. 

Sexual content: Bit sparse. But refreshingly strange. On page 80/1 there is an interesting passage about a man in a cheese shed that rubs cream cheese up Vanina’s thighs as some sort of skincare routine. She is 8 years old at this point so it’s unsavoury to say the least. The main sex bit on page 104 onwards is pretty boring – metaphors such as burning rod of iron and grand statements after the fact such as the limits of her self-hood dropped away are pretty rubbish and sentimental. But I suppose it’s an accurate depiction of a man imagining what a woman’s fantasies might be.

For proper sexual content buy Violet’s chapbook Tinder Bender: https://violetmalice.com/product/chapbook-tinder-bender/

Overall conclusion: 3 out of 10. None of this rings true. Very reductive. Boring erotica. No sexy describing words or hot lust action. Just overly sentimental horse shit – too much detail about nature and the sea which is obviously a metaphor for stupidity – with no actual pay off. Overuse of the word love – which is a total burn off – because love obviously is all a young girl cares about.

Titillation station: Two fingers down (dissatisfied)

Food for thought: He does end it in a very surprising way. After they’ve had it off, you learn very abruptly that her parents were killed by a violent bunch of young men and that she witnessed all of this as well as her mother been raped by these men. She then runs away from her so-called ‘lover’ and leaves Italy without ever wanting to know his name.

Finally, I have a problem with erotica that paints kinks as always linked to damage. I think this book should have been about the guy on the cover having it off with a fridge. I would have enjoyed that more. Stick to what you blow.

Sign-up to Violet’s mailing list if you’re hungry for more: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

Violet Malice

Suck It and See