Customer Reviews

Frenzy: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In the "Food World" there is the concept of an amuse-bousche...the perfect mouthful. It is specially designed by the chef to show off his or her greatest talent, as well as leave the taster begging for more. The collection, Frenzy: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex, accomplishes exactly the same response in an almost identical manner.

Allison Tyler has collected 60 short stories (no longer than 750 words) about hot encounters to fit all tastes. While no single story is enough to completely satisfy you, each one offers an explosive glimpse in to a world you want to re-visit time and time again.

What is especially remarkable is that with 60 stories, there is very little repetition. Each story maintains a unique flavor and impression in your brain. This is the perfect book to read in bed with your lover. You can reach over and say, "Oh, Honey. You have to try this!"

I cannot recommend this book enough!

"Frenzy" to me is that state where rationality is gone; you're acting on impulse and/or instinct, reacting to things rather than anticipating. Your senses are overwhelmed and your cognitive ability has been compromised to the point that you are not in control of what you're doing; you are purely in the moment, and are not necessarily yourself.

So, does this book get us in that realm of sexual frenzy, where nothing but the boink matters, where there is no before and no after, just the sweaty, engorged now? Alison Tyler's intro essentially equates frenzy to the quickie, but expands to a pretty good definition of losing oneself in "the hot liquid silver of a sexual strobe light." I like that imagery a lot, and it explains albeit metaphorically a great deal about sexual frenzy.

You get 60 stories packed into 209 pages. For the erotica bean-counters out there, that's 3.5 pages per story. Things move out very quickly here, and are over just as fast. No time for contemplation, no time for thoughts of consequence. The premise going into every single one of these stories is that you, Dear Reader, are already just as fully aroused as the story's characters. There is no time for seduction or foreplay, no time to build because it's on now, so you'd better keep up, because it's going to be over and done very soon.

There's lots of boy-girl, more than enough girl-girl, and some boy-boy. Plenty of multiple-boy and multiple-girl. Lots of BDSM and power-transfer. And some fun little vignettes that take these standards a bit further afield, like some gentlemen musing on the immense power of delicate female underclothing. The mix is good, and although this collection is packed with stories, there is little repetition.

The vocabulary is unflinching and direct, with no euphemism. Some of the stories push the envelope, like the one about the mourning man who has made plans to join his lady soon, or the Xan West fantasy on delivering unapologetic and unflinching brutality upon a teasing chicken. Strong stuff, most assuredly an adult read throughout.

Props to Janine Ashbless for writing "creamy voluptuous secrecy."

Bottom line: It comes on fast and hard, and is done quickly. As long as you understand this going in, and you're ready for it, this book will be just what you've been looking for.

Everyone knows that having a "quickie" is a great way to keep the passion alive in a relationship and it can be even more fun with a stranger in a completely unexpected place. This book is like a virtual quickie in every sense of the word. Short stories are great for a quick read before you go to bed to have a little fun but these are super-super short stories that will give you a quick "pick me up" while you're at a red light or in line at the drive-thru. They are that short. More importantly they are THAT good!

You should NOT read this book as a book. This is nothing but pure, unadulterated, freaky, sensual, in your face, in your body, animalistic, wanton, Roman-type carnality sex. You buy this book for two reasons and two reason only... to get turned on and to turn on! Get this book at your local bookstore, call your honey, read one of these stories (again, they are super-short so it's perfect), go home to find them waiting for you, call in "sick" the next day because you'll be too tired from the previous night.

Reading a sexual story can be a great aphrodisiac and this book is a great start.

I'm 1/3 through this book and I have not been turned on by one story. The stories are like 2 pages. I don't care about lovers because how 3 dimensional can you get about a character in two paragraphs. Then there is no intesity in this book. Its bland. I thought I was reading a cereal box with adult words mixed in. I found better stories online for free.

I've never read a more boring collection of short stories. Only one of the 60 was decent. That was the one that I read part of when I clicked on the "surprise me" link.

Some of the negative reviewers have a point. The extreme brevity

of these 60 works hardly allows for the development of character

and plot expected of a story. Yet this economy of words also

provides this collection with its strength and delight.

Faced with a severe word limit, most contributors go for the

racy and the explicit. That, I suspect, is what most readers want

-- and get. More interesting, to my taste at least, are those

other contributors who take a different approach. Often they opt

for the subtle and understated, for the erotic over the

plainly sexual. What's lost due to the word limit is made up for

by the reader's imagination. Some examples are

* Nikki Magennis's two very short (each less than 150 words)

contributions ("Madrid" and "Sweets") of pure

description. Personalize them with details of your life.

* Mary Borsellino's "Cartwheels and Strays" plays with two

metaphors as one might expect from poetry.

* August MacGregor's "The First Time He Was Jealous" explores

with hands and with an artist's pencil parts of human

anatomy often skipped over in the rush to get it on.

and, most of all,

* Carmel Lockyer's "The West Pier", which is at once the

least racy and most memorable story of the collection.

As many reviewers have noted, the diversity of these "short shorts"

is one of the strengths of this collection. Surprises lurk. The

best surprises implore the reader to ask, "Why then did I like

this story so much? What does it say about me?"

The thing I love about this book is that there are a lot of stories - 60 - and so if you come across one that you don't like....skipping it doesn't make you feel like you just skipped past 1/6th of the book.

Some of these stories are more artistic and vague, some cut right to the dirty, naughty chase. It's a great mishmash of styles, topics, genders, kinks and views. I will admit that I'm ADD and not your typical woman....I don't go for the subtle suggestive sort of erotic writing. I want to hear about the how/when/where/how much/how often. I want to feel like I'm the fly on the wall. Many of the stories in this book deliver me to that place. Some don't....but that's ok because the one right after it surely will.

I don't know what more to say about Alison Tyler's Frenzy, 60 stories of sudden sex, except that every single story, from the shortest at a few lines, to the longest of a few pages, evokes the hottest and most arousing few minutes you will spend, until you put them into practice. And yes, it's the sex, but most of all it's the story that you will recall. They are stunning.

In this case, the subtitle of the book says it all.

Frenzy, 60 stories of sudden sex is one of the many anthologies put out by Cleis Press, and under the editorial graces of the irrepressible Alison Tyler. A noted writer of erotic fiction short and long herself, she has put out numerous anthologies over the last few years. All are often of a theme or a defining characteristic, and all have a variety of authors, styles, viewpoints, and subjects.

Frenzy takes on the idea of "sudden sex" in short (1-6 page) stories. Sudden sex from people meeting the first time, for the last time, and for sex play ranging from relatively vanilla heterosexual, to the homoerotic, to the kinky. "Wham, bam, thank you sir." is a theme that gets sixty variations.

The advantage and weaknesses of anthologies like this is the sheer variety. Given that variety, its almost guaranteed that you will not like a percentage of the stories. Conversely, there is something here for everyone.

A majority of the stories are told from the woman's point of view, however that is understandable given the majority of the authors are indeed female.Sure, many of the stories are in the first person, but hardly all of them.

I did enjoy many of the offerings, and what is more, a fair number of them moved me and charged me. Its hard to ask for anything more in an anthology of erotica.

Have you ever had tapas? A table filled with little appetizers and you spend an evening nibbling many little dishes? A taste of one: mmmmm, good. A taste of another: oh, that's good. A taste of a third: delicious.

That's how this book is. A collection of all sorts of dishes, from a paragraph long to a half-dozen pages. Don't like a dish? Go on to the next. Really enjoy another? Have a taste and then go on to the next one.