Title: You’ve Got Male
Author: Diana Sheridan
Length: 10,850 words (15 pdf pages)
Publisher: Secret Cravings
Genre: m/m erotica contemporary
Rating: C
Blurb:
A male-cherry-picker meets gay male novices online and initiates them into the wonderful world of man-to-man sex. He describes the encounters in excruciatingly hot detail.
Review:
To be very clear from the start, this is unashamedly pure erotica, no whiff of a HFN or HEA, so you have to take it for what it is. Although the blurb is a bit misleading, the narrator tells of two of his interludes with young virgins, a seeming “hobby” of his, although the second he did not meet on-line, but was the son of a client for whom he was doing some painting work.
It is what it is. Given the nature of the story, the language is more crude than is often typically found in a romance that many of us are accustomed to reading. Despite the narrator’s fascination with “cherries”, he’s not a jerk about it. He’s up front about what is happening, he’s not romancing them or tricking them into sex, so that kind of honestly makes him more appealing than if he was behaving in a more predatory fashion. Although he’s a bit of a slacker who admits he uses time at work to surf the web and find hook-ups.
You only get to know what he chooses to tell you about his partners. One is very young, just past his 18th birthday by a day, the other a 23-year-old health club worker. This is not necessarily my type of book, I tend to like a hint of a possibility for a couple even in erotica most of the time, but this takes the interesting perspective of the narrator telling you about his conquests. It didn’t have any significant problems with style or editing errors, I just find those kind of recounted adventures rather cold and don’t catch my interest. However I know there is definitely a market for these kind of stories, and if you are in the mood for a couple of hot sex scenes with virgins, it will fit the bill. Just don’t mistake it for a romance, or you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Very nice review, Tam. You make it clear exactly what this is. I think readers will buy it for a couple of hot sex scenes with virgins and they won’t be disappointed. I’d probably buy it myself, but I just have too damn much to read already!
(And all of the books on my TBR list are going to offer me hot erotica anyway and more in terms of plot and conflict.)
It seems like an increasingly tough road for erotica-not-romance these days with erotic romance books competing successfully with them on erotica and also being able to pull readers in with plot and conflict. What’s left for erotica writers? To compete on price alone? I don’t even know if that would work…
Well, if you look at ARe there doesn’t seem to be any lack of erotica on the market. There is a discussion in the m/m group about it. When titles with 4,000 words like “Vampires F*ck: The coming” are being sold for $2.99 and you know they are basically crap sucked straight from literotica sites that are poorly edited, it makes it hard for customers to wade through the ugh. I don’t mind erotica, but good erotica which is hard to find amongst all the poor quality smut, which according to the numbers is selling like gang-busters apparently. So there does still seem to be a market for it. I think a romance can be just as smutty and dirty as erotica, it doesn’t have to be a trade-off, hot sex OR plot/romance. Ideally, both I think would be the ideal.
This one is fairly well written and I think falls into the more professionally created erotica zone as opposed to hammering out crap just to make a quick buck.
Yeah, all that $2.99 crap is making ARe not so useful for finding the new m/m romances.
I find more and more I go to ARe when I know specifically what I’m looking for rather than just browsing through to see what catches my eye. I probably miss some stuff that way, but I don’t have time go through hundreds of titles when only 2 or 3 per page are of any interest to me.
There are reputable erotica publishers like Cleis Press that care about quality.
I found out last year that some erotica authors look down on their nose at erotic romance.
Certainly not all erotica can be lumped in as substandard, unfortunately in some ways, the ease of self-publishing means anyone can grab a story and suddenly it’s available in e-book. There was the big scandal on Amazon about authors on Literotica who found their original works being sold by someone else, not even slightly changed, same titles, word-for-word, as self-published.
I think it’s probably a bit of a two-way street on the nose thing. LOL The people who write the books that you are embarrassed to buy at the book store or by that prolific author “anonymous” have always been seen as less than in some ways, it’s certainly not true in all cases, although there are some out there that should never have seen the light of day.
Of course the rise of e-book and on-line stores like Amazon mean more people are able to buy those books without the stigma of wondering if the book store clerk thinks you’re a pervert or that they are your church minister’s wife working her part-time job.
Hehe. I buy both my romance and erotica online. I’ve written one pure erotica short, because there was a call for an anthology edited by Neil Plakcy. Too tempting, right? It took me two tries though–the first one came out too romantic.
Usually, well written erotica makes me think it could’ve been a real good story if only there was something more. Plot, emotions, who knows, probably both.
I’m getting braver now that I’m an old broad. I don’t care what anyone thinks, but it’s actually hard to buy erotica, and surely not gay romance, here. I think so many people do buy those kind of books on-line that most stores don’t even carry them.
Perhaps we are just romantics at heart and like to think that even a hot meeting in a club bathroom stall or behind a pine tree in the park at midnight could lead to twu wuv.
Yeah, I’m definitely a closet romantic.
There’s a very good used bookstore in my neighborhood, and they even have a section on sexuality and erotica. At one time they had a book of the homoerotic drawings of Jean Cocteau (old French surrealist filmmaker). and it was too good to pass on. The guy at the cash register blinked at the cover a few times, but that was it.