Book Review: Deep Inside: Extreme Erotic Fantasies
While Polly Frost certainly borders on science fiction as much as the supernatural, she keeps slash out, paranormal in, and takes the one-handed read to another level altogether
Reviewed by Terry Ornelas Woodroffe, Fri., Oct. 5, 2007
Deep Inside: Extreme Erotic Fantasies
by Polly FrostTor Books, 272 pp., $12.95
Most erotica falls into a few tired genres: the flowery, full of "If I were only a princess" stories that inevitably wind up with said princess getting spanked; smut, which engages the reader in genital contact by paragraph two and climax by paragraph seven; and the unbelievably long-winded erotica-by-proxy that's included in compendiums on a technicality, touching on "touching" only when the plotline has been neatly wrapped up.
What Polly Frost presents in Deep Inside: Extreme Erotic Fantasies is the absolute antithesis of both Anne Rice's Beauty series and the stereotypical "Boy meets girl in elevator; boy and girl have sex; the end" storyline. While she certainly borders on science fiction as much as the supernatural, she keeps slash out, paranormal in, and takes the one-handed read to another level altogether.
In one story, she writes of futuristic humans drinking blood from a new species of sex-starved "Viagra babies"; in another, eerily lifelike voodoo dildos and the consequences of the black magic used to create them. That's not even the oddest of the batch. There's "Orifice," in which a pair of star-crossed lovers discover another world through the magic of piercing, another in which sex aliens turn police into sex fanatics, and another that stars one very naughty, very bratty S&M teenager who turns the tables on a former schoolteacher.
The gleam and steam of erotica aside, these short stories are well-written with an astonishing amount of character development for their length. They all aim for hot under the collar, but an unfortunate few don't make the cut. In the opening story, for example, virgins are forced to fornicate or die at the hands of English-accented covens armed with magical eye shadow. Jump right into the second, and you'll be better for it.
Does putting standard smut through a twisted-sister blender necessarily make it better? No, but as far as pocket-rocket books go, this one stays away from stock clichés and stretches out into new territory. Edgy, dark, and fantastic, these stories all are primed to turn the reader on to a deliciously happy ending.
