Bad love, nasty love, rough love, love sore and sour get some heavy-breathing done in Desire: 100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories chosen by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review. With authors as diverse and deceased as James Joyce, Roald Dahl and Anais Nin to hot and happening ones such as DBC Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Panting alongside expected names such as Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller and Pauline Reage (Story of O, remember?) and surprises such as Alice Munro, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Emma Donoghue (of Room fame) and even Patricia Highsmith, whose gay Carol gives her usual whodunit genre some who-did-whom oomph.
While strippers strip and Victorian ladies routinely lose their modesty, bottoms are spanked, wrists handcuffed and a most unusual voice gets chatty in ‘Vox Vulva’. A F Harrold’s story consisting of unsolicited advice to a woman back-and-forthing between two lovers is not just perky for its threesome-ness but also comic relief.
There’s bridal posset, sipping which causes “a heat, a fire run like hue-and-cry through every part of my body”. The naked body is artistically approached when nude models talking to each other during their break in A Model; one says, “Ever since I was a little girl I liked taking off my clothes… I liked showing my body… I like to pose holding my breasts in my hand… When men touched me I did not get as much excitement.” Sensualists are born or honed; “How they change when desire takes hold of them. The sexual angels!”
Irony is upfront in Luke Jennings’ Small Talk, where only the politically incorrect is allowed at a party, and privacy is the pivot in Elizabeth Speller’s Thought Waves, where phone sex is explicit and arouses more than the two parties involved. Dahl’s The Great Switcheroo—from his naughty collection Switch Bitch—is akin in its mating approach to Malachi O’Doherty’s Love Me, Love My Wife, both about the perils and pleasures of wife-swapping. Katie Kelly’s subversive Let’s Put This To Bed is some first-class first-person BDSM, with feet firmly in stirrups and tongue firmly in cheek.
“This is not a story of romantic love,” she says; just that a beautiful man has “saturated my thoughts and as frequently my knickers” in “a love of the self-destructive variety, destined to end in therapy not marriage”.
Yes, porn is everywhere but erotica has to be read word by word. As a character in Bed & Breakfast purrs, “You always knew what to say.” Words seduce, be it sexting or baldly propositioning a stranger in broad daylight in a running train. These are bold writers dripping adult prose, pursuing you, chasing you, holding you against a wall with dirty talk. People are straddled, bitten and scratched, and their moans are loud. Read this only if you dare.