The Best American Erotica 1997
The fifth installment of Bright's annual offers further evidence that there is some very inventive erotica being produced at the moment--along with a good deal of flat, rather formulaic (albeit exuberantly frank) work. Mark Stuertz's ``Lunch'' offers an ingenious, pungent variation on voyeurism; Marcy Sheiner's ``What?'' nicely catches the complex emotional issues (of honesty, of trust) that surround sex; M. Christian's ``How Coyote Stole the Sun'' offers an ingenious, and deeply weird, x-rated variation on the trickster figure of Coyote, mingling strangeness and sex. While the usual erotic archetypes figure in the collection (threesomes; demon lovers; exhaustively described S&M; games), the tales only really come alive when they offer truly startling variations on the norm or when they give some space to developing a sense of character. An intermittently stimulating gathering. --Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.