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Best Bondage Erotica

Best Bondage Erotica

List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $10.17
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: not much of the best
Review: A few good pieces, the rest just ordinary. The cover art is by far the hottest thing in the book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Absolutely sexiest book ever...
Review: Buy this book for the cover...and then prepared to get blown away by the stories inside. The anthology is just so sexy I can't even say. Cara Bruce's story "The Perfect O" is mind-blowing. M. Christian's "Moving" is about the power of the spoken word. Helena Settimana's "Six Persimmons" may be one of the most beautiful erotic stories I've ever read. But my favorite was "Selling Point" about a realtor and a prospective house-buyer who discover a secret bondage room in the basement of a house. It's totally hot and I'll read it over and over again. If you like bondage, buy this book. If you like sex buy this book. If you like hot covers, buy this book!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best Book!
Review: I'm really thrilled that Alison Tyler came out with another bondage-inspired collection. "Bondage on a Budget" is one of my favorite erotic books, and this is now a contender for first-place. She's gathered an assortment of the best writers around to put together a book that anyone will find sexy. If you're a player, you'll like it. If you've ever fantasized about any sort of bondage, from being held down by a lover's command alone, or bound down with cuffs, thongs, silken bindings, etc., you'll like it. There is nothing scary about this book -- consensual sexual play for people who know what's sexy. And, I must say, the cover is divine. As good as the covers of Erotic Travel Tales and Sweet Life. A perfect gift for yourself or your lover!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good but with a missing part
Review: Of the 21 stories in this collection, there are three that I found to be the best, standing far above the others. There are the stories by M. Christian, Felix D'Angelo, and Thomas S. Roche -- if you've read bdsm erotica before these names may be familiar to you. The other 18 cover many subjects and kinks but they leave out one huge population: gay men. None of the stories could be called gay while there area certainly lesbian, het, thressomes, and solo adventures. This was very disappointing for a book of the "Best".

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good but with a missing part
Review: Of the 21 stories in this collection, there are three that I found to be the best, standing far above the others. There are the stories by M. Christian, Felix D'Angelo, and Thomas S. Roche -- if you've read bdsm erotica before these names may be familiar to you. The other 18 cover many subjects and kinks but they leave out one huge population: gay men. None of the stories could be called gay while there area certainly lesbian, het, thressomes, and solo adventures. This was very disappointing for a book of the "Best".

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Stories with a very Limited Range. Worth Buying.
Review: `Best Bondage Erotica' edited by Alison Tyler is a superior collection of recent stories which deserves the highest complement of leaving you wanting more of the same. The only disappointing side of the picture with this collection is the homogeneity in the tone, settings, personalities, and plots among the stories. This is not to say that there is not a great range of diverse erotic contrivances within the world of modern American suburbia. In fact, the authors' inventiveness makes this an entirely rereadable volume, as I have been through the book at least three times since purchasing it.

The problem I see is that no modern erotic fiction effectively explores the rich boundary between sensuality and horror. Two of the greatest examples of how this boundary can be exploited is the great scene where Fay Wray meets her tall dark anthropoid gentleman caller in `King Kong' and the experiences of Edgar Allan Poe's hero in his chilling short story, `The Pit and the Pendulum'. And, these treatments have not disappeared. Stephen King gave what may be the greatest tribute to Poe's approach in his novel, `Gerald's Game' published a few years ago. And, at least two episodes have appeared on both the original `CSI' and `CSI:New York' in the last few years which treats imaginative bondage situations. Admittedly, the objective of the CSI treatment is not the same as a treatment of the same situations done from the participants' points of view, but the rush experienced by seeing these plots from the victim's point of view is testament to their power. What the CSI treatment looses in concentrating on the puzzles of figuring out what happened from a rather clinical point of view, it gains from the realism the shows are able to achieve by placing the events squarely within a straight world which looks at them objectively.

Admittedly, the CSI lead characters played by William Peterson and Gary Sinise are a lot more enlightened and professional than the average public, so their personal reactions are muted, but the treatment of the eroticism of restraint is at least as fair, if not fairer than Shakespeare's treatment of a Jew in `The Merchant of Venice'. But I'm really straying far from my point.

The stories in this collection are all fantasies that succeed at evoking a genuine restraint imagination purely by staying very close to the world of their readers. There are no Spanish dungeons or 19th century New Orleans basements here. Several stories make a virtue out of this `close to home' attitude in creating little gems of minimalist restraint as we see in M. Christian's story `Moving'. This is so easily reproduced that I strongly suspect that hundreds of pairs of readers have done just that. Other stories such as Thomas Roche's `Bad Girls in Bondage' do require a fairly sizable cache of toys and a somewhat uncommon trio of cohabitants, but it is so likely that it is easy to put oneself in the first person position in the story. Some longer stories such as N. T. Morley's previously unpublished `Shock Therapy' does take place in a much more truly fantastic venue in that it pictures clinical scientists' studying sexual response with devices which would have made Kinsey blush. The improbabilities lie in the fact that I don't think a nonsubmissive Westchester yuppie couple would allow themselves to be put into a transparently contrived bondage. A stronger improbability lies in the fact that no psychological investigator would ever be able to get an Institutional Review Board to approve these kinds of experiments. But this probably doesn't count, as one would probably know this only if they have detailed knowledge of the laws surrounding clinical research.

`Shock Therapy' is an example of the power and importance of pure fantasy in erotic bondage. This is not an endorsement of `Gor' novels so much as it is a request for fiction that takes the reader to a place they simply cannot go themselves. The only fictional account I have seen which effectively treats a both realistic and emotionally satisfying end to a permanent master / submissive relation is `The Story of O'. A paradigm of this fantasy is Edgar Allan Poe's `The Cask of Amontillado'. If I ever read another collection of bondage erotica, I would find it an improvement if there were one or two stories that improvised on this theme.

I encourage the editor and the various authors to keep at it, but try to keep up with both classic and modern boundaries in perceptions of their fantasy worlds.

I also agree with other reviewers who day the cover is one of the best things about the book.



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