Dark Valentines Week continues here at Macabre Republic with the following QuickList of 14 inflaming yet chilling narratives. Tales that simultaneously titillate and disturb. The chosen stories/
novellas are either overtly erotic in tone or take human sexuality (in all its perverse permutations) as their subject. In the interest of symmetry, I've listed selections from seven male and seven female writers.
1.Poppy Z. Brite: "His Mouth will Taste of Wormwood" (1990).
Borderlands: An Anthology of Imaginative Fiction.
Goth debauchery takes a grave turn in this homoerotic update of Poe.
2.Christa Faust: "Tighter" (2004).
Strange Bedfellows (Hot Blood, Book 12).
A bondage addict searches for a special kind of closeness in this modern classic of dark kinkiness penned by an ex-dominatrix.
3.Gemma Files: "Torch Song" (1998).
Kissing Carrion.
An erotic variation on the hard-boiled fiction of James Ellroy, in which a police detective is cursed (by a member of an Aphrodite-worshipping cult) into carrying an un-guttering torch for his male partner.
4.Jack Ketchum: "The Best" (2000).
Peaceable Kingdom.
Break-up sex with a Machiavellian twist. No one handles scenes of sexual violence better than Ketchum.
5.Richard Laymon: "The Diving Girl" (2005).
Dark Delicacies.
Reads like the prose equivalent of the famous pool scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High--at least until the eerie discovery at the end of the story.
6.Edward Lee: Trolley No. 1852 (2009).
This lushly-detailed novella delves into some explicit extrapolation: what if H.P. Lovecraft had applied his writing talents to pornography?
7.Elizabeth Massie: "Hooked on Buzzer" (1988).
Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge.
Warped neo-puritanism begets sexual perversion. One way or another, this story will put a charge into you.
8.Joyce Carol Oates: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966).
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories
A moony teenager who likes to dress and behave beyond her years attracts the attention of the wrong older guy. Arnold Friend's doorstep tete-a-tete with Connie comprises the most unsettling seduction scene since Satan convinced Eve to add more fruit to her diet.9.Chuck Palahniuk: "Guts" (2005).
Haunted: A Novel.
That's exactly what it will take, dear reader, to get through this grotesque yarn about auto-erotic mishap.
10.Norman Partridge: "Spyder" (1995).
The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists.
Partridge takes to heart the old tabloid rumors about black magic rituals, in this clever and steamy fictionalization of the relationship between Maila Nurmi (a.k.a. Vampira) and James Dean.
11.Dan Simmons: "Dying in Bangkok" (1993).
Lovedeath.
"Imagine an organism where you're ejaculating blood," offers one of the characters in this harrowing tale of vampiric fellatio in the Far East.
12.Lucy Taylor: "Fuck the Dead" (1997).
Mondo Zombie.
The title's a tad subtle, so allow me to elaborate: you'll be up to your neck in necrophilia in this nasty piece narrated by a teenage voyeur who's tired of just watching his prostituted zombie-mom and her living johns.
13.James Tiptree, Jr. (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon): "The Screwfly Solution" (1977).
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
Hands down, the most terrifying tale of sexual aggression ever written. The basis as well for a blood-curdling episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror.
14.F. Paul Wilson: "Menage a Trois" (1987).
Hot Blood.
Three's definitely a crowd when it comes to a caretaker, a maid, and a handicapped hag in a hilltop mansion in West Virginia. A masterful erotic-Gothic novella from the multi-talented Wilson.
These selections will likely leave you feeling spent, but by no means is this an exhaustive list (I could probably draw up another one using the very same group of writers, and there are countless other scribes out there who have produced exemplary works of erotic/sexual horror). If you'd like to augment my QuickList and recommend other tales of this type to readers, you can make note of them in the Comments section of this post.
2 comments:
Great stuff, Joe. Karl Edward Wagner's "The River of Night's Dreaming" is another one of the great sado-erotic thrillers I've read.
I've only read a few of Wagner's stories (e.g."Sticks," which was incredible), but certainly enjoyed them. I'll have to check out "The River of Night's Dreaming." Thanks for the rec!
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