Sweetest Kiss - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Kayla

The Sweetest Kiss is an erotica book published by Cleis Press. It's a softcover book that has black and white pages on the inside. There are 19 stories contained in the 209 pages of this book. The book was edited by D. L. King and all of the stories included are from different authors. The tagline for this one is "Ravishing Vampire Erotica", and as you can guess, all of the erotica focuses on vampires. The front cover shows a vampire-looking woman but is definitely more discreet than most other erotica covers. It'd be possible to take this out in public as long as you could hide the cover for most of your reading.

This book focuses mostly on vampires interacting sexually with humans. Almost all of the stories are heterosexual relationships with only one or two being homosexual. For the most part, the vampires in the relationships are usually male with the humans being female. As an added aspect of the vampire erotica, most of the stories usually do include death, but it isn't discussed in length or anything like that. Most of the time, it's either discussed in a sentence or two as the ending, or as an addition, some of the time the person is turned after being drank from. Its nowhere as horribly described as in "Dark Angels" (which is another one of Cleis Press's vampire erotic novels.)

In a lot of the stories, intercourse is the main focus and what the stories usually lead to. Each story usually contains a decent amount of plot without much backstory. You get to learn how the human met the vampire, but it isn't a huge affair or anything with explaining how they became a vampire. A couple of the stories include oral sex, but for the most part, it's just intercourse that ends up being focused.

I actually like the focus of intercourse in this novel. Since vampires are portrayed as being cool and collected until they smell blood, a lot of the intercourse ends up being frenzied and portrays the vampires as having lost control. They aren't portrayed as vicious killers either - they are mostly portrayed as strong, cool characters who, while they want to feed from blood, aren't callous about it. In most of the stories, the vampires actually are providing sexual pleasure because they enjoy their feeding to be pleasurable so they feed right in the midst of their victims' orgasms.

Contrary to the other reviewer who reviewed this book, I definitely think most of the books are well-written. Sometimes I feel like the plot got in the way a little too much which made it a slow read for actual arousal purposes, but all of the stories were written with correct grammar and a good plot that lead into a good sexual story. Some of the stories were more arousing than others, but all of them were well-written. Like I said, a couple were just a little too long to easily get into, but I did like the frenzied and longing approach that intercourse took on for the vampires and victims in this novel.

I think one of the silliest stories in here was "Kiss and Make-Up" by Lisette Ashton. It features Dracula and his vampire girlfriend along with a human third guy that the twosome seems to keep around. Dracula ends up feeding from philosophy students all night, so he's walking around the cemetery acting like some guy strung out on pot. While that happens, the girlfriend complains to third guy that Dracula never wants to have sex after he feeds, and how aroused feeding makes her. It leads to the female vampire having sex with the human male while Dracula proclaims odd philosophical statements in the background. Dracula discovers them, and an interesting turn of events finished the story. Picturing Dracula as some odd, strung-out vampire was hilarious.

In "Fourth World" by Lisabet Sarai, she wrote a story that was highly arousing compared to the rest of the collection. In this story, two human males are out at a bar having a drink when this vampiric woman comes up to them and starts flirting. Things lead to other things, and she takes them back to her apartment (all the while sexually playing with them both in the car), and ties them both up on the bed side by side. Each man watches as the other man is stroked and pleasured by her. Each one has to watch while she feeds on the other which, while they are afraid, they find themselves harder than ever. This entire story is just hot because of how much the two male characters talk about how turned on they are.

In "Red by Any Other Name" by Kathleen Bradean, a human female talks to a male vampire over the phone (she's a pro domme), and they both agree to meet up in her club later on. She fears for her life but goes to meet him anyway. The scene isn't going well since it turns out that her flogging and caning do nothing for a strong vampire. However, when she starts to use holy water as an impact toy...

It was definitely a nice collection. I like how the issue of death was included but skirted around to keep the collection arousing. I like how, unlike other vampire collections I've read, the focus was on intercourse with the biting being a close second. I like how the victims seemed to be enjoying themselves as apposed to just be used for dinner. A very nice compilation of the stories that, if only they all were a bit more arousing, I'd be happy to have given five stars. As it stands, with a couple of the stories being more deep and thoughtful than arousing, it gets four.

The Sweetest Kiss was an okay book. I liked it, but I was overly impressed either. It was good for the first read through, and while I might read it again, it's nothing that's pressing on my time either.

One of the neatest things about the book is that I saw the cover picture on an episode of Criminal Minds last week in an episode of vampirism. It was actually pretty awesome. I was like "That's on my erotica book!".