Review: not awfully-written, but...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 14, 2013
Lacey Kane, The Sexretary's Adventures, vol. 1: The Sexretary (Night Shift Publishing, 2012)Sigh. Okay, I give up. I realize there's a market for what the folks at Goodreads' Dark Erotica group calls non-con books, but having read a few handfuls of them now, I realize equally that I'm just not that market. As soon as we hit that inevitable "oh please don't do that OH YES DO IT" moment, I have an instinctive revulsion that kicks in, and I don't think that's ever going to go away. So I started out giving this the gentleman's C and going from there, attempting to discount the material and focus on the actual structure and writing style as much as possible. And it's not a terribly-written thing, certainly not as bad as much Kindle porn I've subjected myself to over the past couple of years; it's very episodic for being as short as it is (thirty-three pages), which should clue you in that the author isn't spending anywhere near as much time building these scenarios as is necessary for a reader to really identify with any of the characters--but in my case, that turns out to be an unexpected bonus, rather than a detriment. I think the author has enough basic chops that, given some time and attention to the details of character, place (one must consider the realism of having a boardroom-style space in a construction trailer...), etc., s/he--I am never quite convinced that the female names on these files correspond to actual female authors (with the exception of Selena Kitt)--could do some pretty darn good genre work, at least the quality of the better books from Beeline of the other seventies porn presses. This ain't it, but it at least shows more promise than most of the works of this ilk. **