#booksarerad

A couple of years ago I discovered Tiffany Reisz' Original Sinners series via some Buzzfeed listicle on kinky erotica. Of the ten or so books listed, The Mistress seemed the most interesting and I scooped up a copy of the eBook that same day and was hooked. With that novel alone I knew that I'd be reading her work for a long time.

The thing about Reisz is that she loves a good mindfuck. Sure, she's capable of some truly steamy (understatement!) scenes that will have you squirming in your seat but she will challenge all of your preconceived notions at the same time. Never in my life would I have dreamed that the greatest love story of our time would be about a priest, a dominatrix, and a kink club owner (among other things).

I could go on about these books forever, but alas, this review is for The Red, due for release July 11th (8th Circle Press was kind enough to send me an advance copy).  So let's dive right in...

The premise for The Red is simple -- our protagonist Mona Lisa St. James swears to her dying mother that she will save her beloved art gallery. That promise proves hard to keep when financial troubles set in. Enter Malcolm, a mysterious stranger who offers her the perfect (?) solution. All he asks is that she submit to him for one year. He will come to her no more often than once a month, and after each assignation she will be paid with art, each piece more priceless than the last. While Mona has reservations about such an illicit arrangement, she eventually agrees, and that's when things really get interesting.

Each meeting has a theme derived from a particular work of art, and they run the gamut from the more traditional idea of submission (flogging) to more fantastical situations (my personal favorite, an encounter with the Minotaur of ancient myth). The Red is billed as an erotic fantasy and Reisz certainly delivers with beautiful prose sure to thrill. I am certainly no prude but I found myself blushing quite a bit.  

The sex scenes are enough for me to recommend this title on their own, yet in typical Reisz style there's more to the story. I hesitate to call The Red a coming-of-age tale, but we do get the pleasure of seeing Mona come into her own as a sexual being. She is no virgin at the beginning of the book, but as the story progresses she completely and shamelessly embraces her new role as Malcolm's whore.

As Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a short story, clocking in at about twenty pages, its review will be equally short:

Shit's weird, y'all.

I kid, I kid -- I'm certainly going to give you more than that. The story was written during the Cold War and Ellison's prediction for the future is grim, to say the very least. Following mounting tensions, the Cold War escalates into World War II, with the US, China, and the USSR as the main aggressors. Each superpower constructs its own supercomputer to run the wars for them, but they prove all too powerful when one gains sentience and absorbs the other two. Thus, AM, the "Aggressive Menace," is born. AM brings about the apocalypse, killing all of mankind save for five people who serve as his playthings. The word "playthings" sounds too nice, but I suppose it still applies. AM harbors immense hate for mankind, and subjects his "pets" to every imaginable (and unimaginable) cruelty for more than 100 years, driving each mad in their own way. The computer starves, maims, mutates, and berates them, all the while making them virtually immortal to ensure he has eternal amusement at their expense.

I liked this quite a bit, because I have a bit of an affinity for weird shit. Ellison's prose is both eloquent and raw, providing some serious psychological horror in less than two dozen pages. You can feel the narrator's paranoia pouring offhim in waves, his disjointed observations highlighting his degraded mental state. As you can imagine, some of the more detailed descriptions are horrific -- the final lines are especially haunting. It reminded me of a bleaker No Exit (I know, right?) with way higher stakes.