Red Velvet and Absinthe - erotic book by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Jul!a

Red Velvet and Absinthe is a book of short stories edited by Mitzi Szereto and contains stories from Rose De Fer, Janine Ashbless, Elizabeth Daniels, Mitzi Szereto, Anna Meadows, Charlotte, Stein, Zander Vyne, Evan Mora, Ashley Lister, Sharon Bidwell, Claire Buckingham, Giselle Renarde, Carrie Williams, Tahira Iqbal, and Bonnie Dee; with a foreword by Kelley Armstrong. The end of the book has information on all of the authors and the editor.

The general theme behind all of these stories is of the paranormal. Whether that means vampires, voodoo love dolls, or anything else "otherworldly" depends on the author, but there's a healthy smattering of a number of different paranormal goings on. Most of the stories involve heterosexual couplings, but there's one or two with some same sex pairings. Nothing much though, so if you're wanting same sex paranormal stories, you'll have to keep looking.

In Dolly, Sophie makes herself a dolly out of spit and straw and other things usually used for fake magic in the movies. When the doll just appears in the form of a living breathing man at the foot of her bed, Sophie rightly freaks out. But she comes to love her dolly; passionately, madly, insanely. And in the end discovers just how made for each other they are.

Painted brings us to a house where a man's wife despises a painting he acquired of a beautiful woman. The groundskeeper offers to take it into his home to protect the woman in the painting from being trashed or burned, and he soon discovers there's much more to her than initially thought when he awakes one night to find her in his room.

We have a tale of werewolves in Scratched, where a man has holed himself up in a house in the moors after being attacked by a werewolf. His wife thinks he's being crazy and traverses there to beg him to come back home with her. The longer she stays there the more she thinks he might not be crazy, and the less she cares.

Nothing out of the ordinary as far as paperbacks go. The cover isn't terribly risque with an image of a woman with a red and black feather mask, but it does say "paranormal erotic romance" in big enough letters that you'll be able to figure it out without much studying.

I love erotic tales of the paranormal variety, and this book has quite a selection to choose from. One of my favorites was The Persistence of Memory. Part of that is my weakness for vampire stories, and part of it was just how unbelievably fairy tale romantic it was, at least to me. It reminded me a lot of the bond between my husband and myself; something that you just sort of know. Well, maybe you guys wouldn't know about mine, but I know it, and this story makes me think of my husband.

All in all, I think this is a good book for those who like erotic paranormal stories with heterosexual couplings.