G Is For Games - erotic book by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Red

Alison Tyler is a well known, respected, and loved erotica editor and author. Her personal website (alisontyler.com) is cool, funky, edgy and above all else, delightfully professional (and...dare I say...is actually SAFE for work!) Alison Tyler has had a long, varied and sucessful career in smut, authoring a variety of short stories and twenty five full length novels, as well as serving as editor on over fifty erotic anthologies. Ms. Tyler calls herself a 'Trollop with a Laptop' and she shares this moniker with her personal blog, which features smart and spunky blog posts full of observations, great finds, and a dabbling of personal promotion. She also tweets prolifically and has an informative wikipedia page.

Alison Tyler is the author one on story in this anthology, which features a grab bag of erotica authors none of whom I recognize with the exception of Rachel Kramer Bussel. This collection does not feature a meet the authors section as many anthologies often do, just a short bio on Ms. Tyler.

This collection is comprised of thirteen stories centered around the concept of games. The actual sex is a mixed bag - some is kinky, some is vanilla; some is straight, some is same sex. That said, in general the stories are generally hetero and not too kinky, so I would say the target audience is one whose tastes run on the vanilla side of sex but don't mind having the occasional boundary pushed by the power of suggested deviancy.

The book starts with a story about a game of twister that's all entangled with sexual tension and the promise of more, then dives wildly into scenarios surrounding classic sports - tennis, football, baseball, pool... The thing about these stories is that the scenarios are unexpected. A couple takes advantage of a night free of the kids to do a little highschool jock/cheerleader role play. A man with a baseball fetish does things to a baseball bat that I'd never even dreamed could be possible. The obvious use of spot paraphernalia - penetration of the tennis racket (for example), blends into stories where the sport is but a minor flirting point in a larger story about the competitiveness between two baseball fans. Aside form the sporting stories, there are explorations of more adult games - poker, chess - and the intensity of the dance between two players intent on full domination of the pieces in front of them. Finally, some of the stories, such as "Seven Minutes In Heaven" are about games based on sex and arousal, where the 'game' lays out the entirely of the plot of the story, rather than being a component of a larger scene. The final story, Alison Tyler's "The Game" is about domination and submission, sort of, in as much as it is about the wild and free parties hosted by a particularly adventurous group of friends. Its a nice mix of stories, and it never gets old because the games played are so different in nature that nothing feels repetitive.