Review: Short but steamy.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2012
James Wood's "Shower Time" is less traditional "short story" than contemporary erotic vignette; a single, intimately atmospheric scene that unfolds before the mind's eye like the most carefully executed tracking shot in a small-scale art film.  The setting is quickly, vividly established with a deft economy, even as the author manages to keep us guessing about certain details for a while--truly impressive on such a compressed narrative canvas. The use of language is fascinating in itself, varying throughout the scene from delicately artful to unabashedly raw, without ever noticeably "shifting gears" or inducing stylistic vertigo in the reader's imagination. The wonderfully subtle use of conversational first-person, in which the narrator says "you" even more often than "I," is a welcome departure from the banal autoerotic amateurism of so much contemporary "smut."A superb example of what skilled writers can achieve with flash fiction, "Shower Time" has the potential to inspire a new movement in Literary Erotica; call it the "quickie," the "short-short" or the "ultra-mini." Gathered together, two or three dozen high-quality stories like this might well form an impressive--and best-selling--anthology. In the meantime, this title may be recommended all on its own.