Afternoon Delight - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Kayla

Afternoon Delight is an erotica book published by Cleis Press and edited by Alison Tyler. It features the regular Cleis Press layout and above your average book size. It has 170 pages in which 24 different stories are contained. The tagline for this book is "Erotica for Couples", so all of the stories in this book focus on couples who are already in a committed relationship/marriage. The front cover features a picture of a man and woman embracing with a pleasurable look on the female's face - there's nothing extremely erotic about it, so if you wanted, I'm sure you could take this out in public, but it's not something that I would do.

I was surprised by the lack of homosexual couplings in this book. When I read the tagline "Erotica for couples", I was expecting more tame and more sexy stories than most of the other erotic books - I wasn't expecting that to mean "All heterosexual couples". It wasn't a huge deal, but I was expecting a bit more variety in this department - normally Cleis Press books have a good amount of variety in terms of sexuality.

Another thing of note is that the stories range in length from one page to about 15 pages. For the most part, most stories fall around the 8-10 page length. I have to say that I'm not as fond of the smaller stories in this book. There's something about having a longer time to get to know the characters that really appeals to me in an erotic novel - if it gets straight down to the sex, it feels a little rushed to me. I like to get a nice background of the characters and the plot.

The plots in this book range a bit as well. Nothing is quite as unique as some of the other stories I've read in other novels, but they all serve to be relatively arousing. I found that I find some stories really hot while I was a little bored and unturned on with other stories. There didn't seem to be much of a happy medium with this book. Very few of the stories included much kink in them - it tended to be mostly vanilla sex, and a few of the stories focused on a couple re-finding their love life.

In "Black Light" by N.T. Morley, a couple goes out to a sexually-open party and starts to play out in the open. Wanting some privacy, they instead choose to go to a backroom that's lit only by black light in which a camera watches the room, so couples cover themselves in glow-in-the-dark body paint in the places where they'd like the camera to pick up their action. Their action, of course, plays on a large television in the middle of the playroom. Overall, it's just a really hot story.

In "Knit One, Purl Two" by Jacqueline Applebee, a man who is a devoted knitter starts to find the idea from yarn bondage as appealing. His girlfriend decides to indulge him in it. Not a particularly hot story, but I thought the plot was definitely pretty unique.

In "Date at South Station" by Xavier Acton, a married guy is driving home from work when he has to slam on his breaks because a prostitute has stepped in front of his car. He starts to proposition her when he notices that it's his wife! She gets in the car, and he takes her back to a cheap hotel where she demands money for her time and services. Maxing out his ATM limit, they go back into a hotel room where he treats her like a prostitute. This is probably my favorite story out of the collection. It's hot, it's raw, and I'd honestly never think up a plot like this on my own. I was impressed.

For the most part, though, I just wasn't really "moved" by most of the stories in this collection. They're good stories, but none of them stand out as particularly sexy or unique. When looking through the collection, aside from a few choice stories, I didn't find myself "conflicted" about which stories to highlight in this review like I normally do. I found myself wondering which ones were even hot enough to be featured. All the stories waver around the same level of hotness, but it just isn't "amazing". It's still a decent collection of hot stories that will most likely arouse you though, so if you are looking for a set of erotic stories that feature couples together, this is a neat book to pick up - it's just not something if you are looking for the next most unique sex story to read.

I still like Afternoon Delight, but I won't pretend like it's the most amazingly sexy book I've read. It had some nice stories, and it had some good romance, but it wasn't the most erotic book I've read. I've never re-read it since the first time I touched it, but a couple people have asked to read it themselves and they liked it okay.

Suppose it just depends on the person. The book is holding up amazingly, and like all Cleis press novels, it's produced with quality in mind.