Category: Books

There is something inherently erotic about certain forms of horror. The modern incarnations in slasher movies have nothing erotic about them, but much of older horror did. Vampires are particularly evocative in this context. Vampirism, after all, has always been a metaphor for sexual congress.

Curiously, one of the oldest English vampire stories, Polidori’s The Vampyre, recalls an older form. Lord Ruthven is a vampire from the beginning of the story, but during the first part of it he is clearly still living. He dies, or becomes un-dead, partway through the story. One might say that the story is also a cautionary tale, and even something of a condemnation of the exaggerated sense of honor in vogue at the time. After all, our hero could have saved his sister if he hadn’t thought that upholding his oath to Ruthven was more important than her life.

Lord Ruthven is also, like most pre-1922 vampires, not particularly bothered by sunlight. That vulnerability seems to date from that year, when it was first used in the unauthorized German Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu. Count Orlock, to be sure, did not burst into flame, which seems to be the modern standard. He simply faded out of existence.

The Irish writer, J. Sheridan LeFanu, provided a different vampiric milestone. Carmilla, the title character in his novella, is also seemingly comfortable moving about in the daylight. She is also, rather clearly, a lesbian, and her vampirism seems to be connected with this sexual appetite. LeFanu might be given credit for the notion of the vampire as shape-shifter, for Carmilla often commits her depredations in the form of a large cat.

Hammer’s 1970 adaptation, The Vampire Lovers, emphasizes the lesbian aspects somewhat more than LeFanu, who had to contend with Victorian standards that allowed only oblique inferences. It also contains a good deal of nudity, with the sort of natural, unmodified female bodies that still prevailed in the early 1970s. It’s just my opinion, but I can’t help thinking naked women looked better in those days than they do now.  I’m not sure that I did, but I was five when this movie came out, so I was kept well covered up. Particularly in the household where I grew up. No one went to horror movies because, you know, Jesus wouldn’t have approved, particularly if there was nudity.

It would be another thirteen years or so before I got around to experimenting with sex. Mostly with the other cheerleaders. We had these weekly Bible study sessions after games, you see, where we’d read all the dirty parts, such as Lot and his daughters, or where Abraham admits that Sarah, his wife, is also his half-sister, or David and Jonathan (those two were gay as shit, trust me), or just about anything in Song of Songs. Reverend Killjoy insisted Song of Songs was an allegorical ode to Jesus’ love for the church. In our opinion, it was mostly about fucking and pussy eating.

Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, spent several years working for LeFanu before taking on the role of Henry Irving’s theatrical manager. His research into central European vampire legends rounded out the literature. His imagined world still dominates, and there are constant references to Dracula in literature and film. There are certainly vague hints at a lesbian relationship between Mina and Lucy, at least as school girls. I’ll admit that I rather picked up on that, then took it all the way, when I was writing Lust for Blood, which not only has vampires but a good deal of explicit (in a Victorian sort of way) lesbian sex.

Originally, there was going to be a bit of incest, too, but I decided that this was something that might appeal to a broader readership than most of my books, so that came out. We have to make compromises if we want to sell anything on Kindle or iTunes. (The iTunes version, along with any other non-Amazon eBook versions, should be along sometime in February, after the Kindle Unlimited enrollment expires.)(So if you want to read it free, you need to do so now.)

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I’m still working on the first chapter of The Erotic Adventures of a Lady’s Maid, my version of the Victorian sex novel that Maureen O’Leary, Lady Anna’s lady’s maid in Lust for Blood, claims to have written. It’s been a few days, and I’m probably only about a third of the way through the chapter. Keep in mind, though, that these are Victorian chapters, the sort that start with a list of subtitles, so this first chapter covers: Birth and Childhood; The Allinghams confer; Early service; The journey to Elton; Arrival in Elton; Corningwood Manor; Meeting Mrs. Allen; Duties explained; Introduction to Lady Caroline; An impudent groom; Meeting Lord Corningwood; A gift from her mistress. In other words, in a modern novel, this one chapter would likely be the first ten or twelve.

There’s no sex in “Birth and Childhood,” obviously. I write very sexual characters, but they’re all of legal age before they get into anything. The Allinghams, the solicitor and his wife who employ Cecily’s parents, do their conferring in bed, however, so we get into it fairly quickly. It’s very kinky, in a Victorian sort of way. People in late Victorian times were very staid and proper, as long as they though anyone was looking, but they could be just as weird as modern people when they were alone. In “The journey to Elton” section, Cecily, on her way to her new position in rural Kent, has the train compartment to herself so, naturally, she takes advantage of the solitude to masturbate her way out of London. Things will, as they say, go on from there.

There are obvious differences in writing about Victorians and writing about contemporary people. Sexuality hasn’t changed that much, but the way it’s expressed has. Victorians were flowerier, for one thing, and somewhat less inclined to using some of the more popular modern vulgarisms. Mind you, they rarely wrote “penis,” or “vulva,” or any of the proper terms, either. They were more inclined to “his massive tower of pleasure,” or “the fragrant depths of her secret cave of passion.” I don’t know if they actually talked that way, but they certainly wrote that way.

Getting into that style takes a bit of adjustment. Since the story is set in England, there’s the additional adjustment of switching to British spelling and syntax. The date of the story, mostly 1894, dictates much of the context. People are getting around in carriages, and on horseback, or by bicycle. They wear a lot more clothing than we do now. One reason lady’s maids existed was because wealthy women often wore dresses that required a second person helping to get in and out of. A bodice fastened by twenty buttons, all in the centre of the back, for example, or a laced corset that was, again, operated from behind.

You also need to figure out the back stairs hierarchy in a place such as Corningwood Manor, seat of the Corningwood family for centuries. Who works under whom, that sort of thing. A lady’s maid was something of an odd girl out in that sort of household. She was often the only female staff member who, while definitely a servant, answered directly to the lady of the house, and not to the housekeeper. Governesses were in a similar position, except that a governess was not, technically, a servant, being usually a gentlewoman with a proper education, and not working class. A lady’s companion fell into a similar category, with the most important distinction being that, while she was obviously paid for her services, she was normally treated more as a family member, including, generally, eating with the family and not with the servants.

A lady’s maid such as Cecily, who was literate, well-spoken, and properly educated, might be called upon to act as both maid and companion. She’d still eat with the servants, though, but she was presentable enough, and articulate enough, to be taken along on visits and trips.

Most Victorian lady’s maids did not, of course, provide quite the same level of intimate services Cecily provides for her employer, but Cecily is rather special, and Lady Caroline is quite beautiful and just happens to prefer other women to men. Cecily, to be honest, doesn’t discriminate.

It’s going to be an interesting book. I think I can safely say that much.

I’m wondering if I should simply shut off commenting. As it is, all comments have to be approved by me before they appear. You might notice that there aren’t any appearing here yet, which I think neatly categorizes the half dozen or so submitted daily. It’s not that I won’t approve comments, even some rather quirky ones, but I’m not going to do that if the comment has nothing whatever to do with the post, or is obviously written by a bot instead of a person. My personal favorite (I get two or three of these every day, usually on the same early post) is a long collection of paragraphs that are obviously intended as “select one” generic comments. These people don’t give a shit what they say, because the point of the comment isn’t the comment, it’s the half-dozen spam URLs included with it.

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I know some of you are going to be a little disappointed that there’s no incest in Lust for Blood. It started out that way, but I ended up cutting it once it became obvious that this one might just be capable of breaking out of that narrow specialist market. The cut didn’t involve that much. Just had to change where things were aimed in an early scene. Our pals at Amazon don’t seem to mind implication, but definitely frown on anything overt.

It’s fun writing from a late Victorian viewpoint. The setting is mostly a rural estate, which means things such as electricity and telephone service have yet to make it so far from town. Rich people–the first viewpoint character’s father was an Earl, as is her brother, now that their father has passed, and the new neighbour is a Marquess–still had servants in 1895, so perhaps they didn’t miss the conveniences. Not having electricity means using gas lights and paraffin lamps, both of which are certainly more evocative of the period. Not having telephones in the countryside means that, when Lord Muntglare desperately needs to get the doctor out to the estate to care for his sister, all he can do is send a servant with the dog cart to collect him. Something that may take up to three hours.

Dog carts, by the way, which were always popular conveyances in Victorian fiction, are obviously pulled by horses, not dogs. They were two-wheeled, open carriages. The name came about because the seat was built over a ventilated compartment intended for transporting hunting dogs. Holmes and Watson seemed to spend a lot of time being hauled about the countryside in dog carts. At one point in this book Lady Anna and Suzanne stow their picnic hamper in the dog box.

I get to write as several people in this. It’s mostly diary entries, and about the only major character who doesn’t write anything is the vampire. He’s in good company there. The Count was notably silent when it came to contributing his own thoughts in Dracula, too. Lady Anna’s lady’s maid, Maureen, comes up with some good stuff. It seems she has a second identity of sorts, writing Victorian stroke books under a pen name. She’s a pretty Irish girl, obviously better-educated than most servants (she can read French, too), and sees nothing at all problematic with having lesbian sex with her mistress and her friend. She just sees it as something nice she can do and, besides, she enjoys it.

Lady Anna and Suzanne both talk about marrying, but you can tell their hearts really aren’t into it. It was just one of those things women were expected to do in the 1890s.

You really do need to read this book. It was partly inspired by a single line from Dracula, when Lucy writes to Mina, “We have slept together…” Now, I’m sure the original readers, back in 1897, were supposed to interpret that as they were roommates and slept in the same room. Me, I have a dirty mind, so I always figured those two spent a lot of time at boarding school playing at being lesbians before being graduated and settling on boring old men. That was  a fairly common Victorian pornographic theme, after all. Boarding school lesbians is still a popular theme. I’m fairly sure that Lady Anna genuinely is a lesbian, knows it, and, if she ever marries at all, it will only be out of a sense of duty. Suzanne is, I suppose, sexually flexible (she fucks Lady Anna’s brother, too, after all), but seems to have a preference for women.

There’s no question at all about whether these two were getting it on in school. They roomed together, and on colds nights they slept in the same bed, naked, and obviously going at it every chance they could get. They make that quite clear. They also make it clear they started just after Suzanne’s eighteenth birthday. People in racy novels tend to wait longer than real people. And, naturally, when they get together three years after leaving school, it’s obvious that with a dozen empty bedroom in the big manor house, Suzanne will share Lady Anna’s bed. At least, until Lady Anna starts to decline and finds herself inclined to bite (there are vampires in this, remember).

Because Lust for Blood is set in 1895, and mostly consists of diary and journal entries, with a couple of newspaper clipping and letters, the language may be a bit more oblique than in my modern stories. Victorians tended to speak of “rampant masculinity,” or “that glistening pearl wherein a woman’s passion is centred,” or other slightly flowery things like that. The ladies do throw in a few “cunts” and “quims.” Hell, people, Shakespeare slipped a few “cunts” into his plays, usually as puns, so there’s precedent.

This was also a time when doctors treated “hysteria” by reaching under their patients’ voluminous skirts and masturbating them to orgasm. It was even the time when the vibrator was invented, originally as a labor-saving device for gynecologists whose fingers were cramping up dealing with throngs of hysterical women.

There was a time when hysteria was a common complaint, if only because, most of the time, the only one getting off in the marriage bed was the husband. The three ladies of Muntglare Manor are just a bit more progressive than some of their contemporaries. They’ll get each other off, and if that isn’t practical, why, they’ll take matters into their own hands, so to speak.

I suppose I should warn you, this is actually a legitimate, more or less mainstream novel with a lot of sex scenes, not a sex novel with a vampire or two. It’s not for kids, obviously, but neither is it so far out that a film producer might not be well-advised to snap it up now while the rights are still cheap.

The Kindle edition is on sale now at Amazon.com, or you can read it free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, or want to use your monthly Prime borrow. A paperback edition is in the pipeline as well.

I’m working on a new book. This one is a little different from the usual. It’s a period piece, set in the summer of 1895, on a country estate in England. It’s also a multi-viewpoint story, mostly told in the form of diary and journal entries, with the occasional letter, telegram, or newspaper clipping tossed in. It’s a style that was fairly common in the late 19th century, but isn’t encountered that often today. Or “to-day,” as they would have spelled it then.

Naturally, as this is one of my books, there’s a lot of sex. The terminology is a bit different than what I usually use. There are no pussies, cocks, dicks, pricks, or snatches, for instance. There are quims, some of them quivering, organs, manhoods (rampant and otherwise), secret depths, nether lips, and the occasional cunt (a surprisingly ancient word, as it happens, which can even found as an allusion and/or pun in Shakespeare). Setting a book in 1895 means adjusting vocabulary to fit the period, and even though the “quoted” writings are private, and purportedly set down in a secret cipher, the “naughtiness” quotient is somewhat dictated by the period and the social class of the writers. So is the spelling, so please don’t ding me about that. Victorians put hyphens in a lot of words we don’t: to-day, to-night, dark-room, cow-boy, and so forth. They also tended to abbreviate “et cetera” as “&c.” rather than “etc.”

What I’m wondering about is whether I should cut out the incest. Even though it takes a while to get there, the main “issue” is a vampire moving into the neighborhood. It takes a while to get there because, up to that point, I spend a lot of time establishing the relationship between Lady Anna and her visiting school chum, Susanne. In Dracula, Stoker obliquely implied that Mina and Lucy may have experimented with lesbianism while at school together.  With Lady Anna and Susanne, it’s not so much implied as overt. They were getting it on with each other on those cold nights at school, and they’re still getting it on now that they’re together again after Susanne takes a three-week holiday on Lady Anna’s estate.

It’s a rather “decadent” household. Lady Anna’s brother, Edwin, Earl of Muntglare, is a dedicated amateur photographer, whose favorite subjects are nude women, his sister included. When he organizes a photography session with his sister and Susanne, things just sort of happen between the two women, and he can’t help getting involved himself. The question I now have is whether I keep the sisterly blowjob, or have him get it on with Susanne instead.

The difference between those outcomes could easily be the difference between the book appearing in Kindle or being banned from Amazon, like most of my other books. Of the six books I currently have on sale, only one of them, One Room, can be found at Amazon. That one has its share of fucking, but no one is related, so it can be sold. The others are only at Lot’s Cave, and a few other outlets where they don’t worry so much about incestuous or other “kinky” content.  The new book might just be good enough to go more mainstream, rather than fetish, so I’m going to have to decide which it will be.

I also need to decide what I’m going to call it, but that’s another issue entirely.

This is always a question for anyone writing erotica. Just how dirty do you make your book or story? Do you try to keep it tame enough to appear in the bigger markets? Or do you go into areas that a lot of people think of as perversions, limiting sales to the handful of outlets that sell that sort of thing?

I do both. Of my four currently-published books, three are in the specialist category, and one is more basic erotica. There are three more books at the publisher now, which should be on sale soon, again in the specialist area. By specialist, I mean there’s some adult incest involved. And there might be a brief mention of a horse somewhere.

Honestly, this is more a marketing decision than a literary one. Erotica sells, and for some reason the kinkier types sell better than the tamer variety. Back before Amazon started cracking down, if you published essentially identical books, but in one you made the characters unrelated, and in the other you made them siblings, the second one would sell in the hundreds of copies in the same time it took the other to sell a couple dozen.

That’s one of the dirty little secrets of the erotica genre. A very large proportion of incest erotica is simply non-incest stories with a relationship added. If you have a guy in a threesome with a pair of bisexual waitresses, you gain some extra sales if you make them sisters. That sort of thing. School friends become siblings, an older neighbor becomes an uncle or a father. It doesn’t take much.

Amazon, of course, doesn’t take any of it. Not if they notice it, which they eventually do. One anthology I was a part of, though not using this pen name, was a perennial favorite on Amazon for several years, until someone noticed that a lot of the characters were related to each other, and the rest were mostly in high school (but all over 18). How they managed to miss it for so long is a mystery, considering the title was Loving Families and Naughty Schooldays, which would seem to provide adequate clues about the contents. And, if the title didn’t, the blurb certainly did, in the usual, carefully implied but not quite stated way. You can still buy the book, but you have to get it from Lot’s Cave now.

I love the name, Lot’s Cave. I went to one of those ridiculous Christian schools back home in Atlanta. You know the ones, where the cheerleaders dress like it’s still the Truman administration, and biological diversity is staunchly asserted to be the result of Noah dropping off different animals in different places. We spent a lot of time reading the Bible. Parts of it, anyway. It’s surprising how much is essentially just ancient porn. The story of Lot and his two daughters is one of the better incest stories.

In case you don’t remember, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his two daughters took refuge in a cave near Zoar. Hiding there, they believed the entire world had been destroyed, not just those cities, and there’d be no one for them to marry. Since the two daughters, who were presumably the same two virgins their father had offered to the rape gang outside his house a few days earlier, wanted children, they decided to get him drunk and sleep with him.

I really don’t believe this for a minute. Leave aside that I think most of the Bible is just a collection of old myths, and has about as much to do with reality as Dracula, the situation just doesn’t work for me. Have you ever tried to have sex with a guy who’s so drunk he’s passed out? He needs to be reasonably sober, and conscious, if you expect him to get hard. So, just based on that, I’d say Lot knew what was going on. Given the anti-feminist stance of the Bible, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole thing wasn’t his idea.

That’s the thing. If you use the Bible as a literary guide, you can reasonably include all sorts of perversions. Abraham was married to his half-sister, Lot fucked both of his daughters, all four of Jacob’s wives were sisters, two full, two half, Song of Songs spends a good deal of time rhapsodizing about breasts, love, and, if you’re paying attention, cunt  licking. Reading between the lines, it seems fairly obvious that Jesus was gay (never married, spent all his time hanging around with a dozen guys, and just before his death turned over responsibility for caring for his mother to the disciple he “loved”). You’ll never convince an evangelical of it, but it’s really kind of obvious he was more into guys than gals.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered the original question. I tend to go pretty far in my writing, mostly involving incest and pee play. Others may not. It really does boil down to a question of where you want to sell. One Room, which you can find on Amazon, is about two completely unrelated lovers. Freaky Farmers, which is only available from Lot’s Cave, triplets having sex, a guy screwing his mother, a hot babe sucking off her brother by the pool, and two sets of siblings (and cousins) screwing around both separately and together.