A recent erotic interactive book that I read was Princess to Pleasure Slave Adventure: The Dungeon of the Monster Breeder by Amanda Clover. It places you in the role of a captured Princess who is thrown into a terrible dungeon of sex obsessed monsters who will mind control you as soon as they fuck you. Your goal is to find your sisters who are also in the dungeon, escape and kill the evil wizard who runs the place. Or perhaps your goal is to get fucked by the monster of your choice. We don’t judge.

Rape and mind control fantasies are often tricky subjects to tackle in erotica. People have fantasies of being raped but this is often associated with real rape because of the rape culture that we live in. For me, rape is about violence and non-consent. People who indulge their fantasy of being raped by reading books and watching erotica is giving their consent to enjoy something non-consensual. For this to work however, the reader has to be fully informed of what they are about to read. If someone goes into a story expecting consensual sex and there is surprise non-consensual sex, that is a gross violation of a reader’s trust. If a reader is forewarned that there is non-consensual scenes coming, then the reader gives their consent to the story by reading.

This is basic stuff but I wanted to go over it because of what I feel is the unique nature of interactive erotica. We as readers identify with the main character but we super-identify with a character when we are playing as the character. With the level of trust required to be invested in an interactive story I feel the stakes are higher to make sure that we respect the player’s level of consent.

Dungeon of the Monster Breeder does this extremely well.  Up front in the introduction it is explained that sexual contact with monsters while in the dungeon will result in a loss of control and a terminal end to the story. Fuck the monsters here and you will be fucked.

Which makes it interesting that the book uses the same five choices for every encounter. You can attack, you can wait, you can use magic, you can try talking or you can go ahead and surrender. Surrender results in just letting the monster have their wicked way with you.

I find this to be brilliant. The other choices are about overcoming monsters. Some will work and some will fail. However, the surrender option works as a sort of reverse-safeword. It asks for your consent to fuck you. It tells the book to do whatever it wants and it delivers with some really good extensive monster/mind control scenes.

If you choose to not get fucked, there is a lot of cool things to do. You fight monsters, slay beasts and outwit terrible thing. The challenge level ramps up nicely and I didn’t suffer my first loss until 3/4 of the way through the dungeon and even then it was my own dumb fault. This is not a book will send you to a fail state unfairly. The monsters range from the disturbing to the sexy. My personal favorite involved a hunchback on top of a pile of bodies.

Best of all, the adventure itself is interesting and takes some surprising turns. It is good erotica but it is also a good game.

Amanda Clover has written several interactive erotica books and I recommend them all.

Forever Doomed is a collection of comics and essays by Tenebrous Kate. She focuses on DOOM in music, literature and movies. This book is a lot like having Kate’s brain in paperback.

I love this little fanzine and it has super high production values from start to finish. This feels like the Blu-Ray edition of fanzines. The pages are glossy and sturdy which means it will survive even my rough handling.

Plus, Forever Doomed contains the best Nazgul on Nazgul sex scene you will ever read.

This super-affordable fanzine deserves a place on your weird bookshelf.

I give it Five out of Five Pam Griers.

Adult Video #1 is a collection of stories by Lexi Maxwell. The stories involve the three employees of an adult store. They flirt, they talk, they deal with weird customers, they talk, they have sex and they talk. Mostly they talk.

The book is dedicated to Kevin Smith’s Clerks and rightly so. This takes the Clerks premise of employees chatting about everything and makes it twice as filthy. Fortunately the characters are more likable than they are in Clerks and of course, the hot sex doesn’t hurt either.

I found this to be an interesting book. It is almost a pornographic sitcom. Humor drives the plot and the constant dialogue about adult subject matter was fun. They discuss fetishes, sex toys and mostly, why won’t the slightly-less-slutty character sleep with the slutty guy like the slighty-more-slutty character already does. It should get old but it doesn’t due to the genuinely funny things that keep happening.

Each story is about 80% story and 20% sex scene and I was pleasantly surprised by how hot the sex scenes were. This was the rare porn book that I was reading for the story but the sex was excellent as well. It has plenty of laugh out loud moments but also the kind of sex scene that you think about for days after.

My only complaint is that I feel sometimes that characters were a little two-dimensional but that seems like an odd complaint for a comedy.

I give it Four out of Five Pam Griers.

Natural Desire, Strange Design is an erotica book by Aishling Morgan. It is part of the “Nich Mordant” series of books but it is a stand alone story that does not require the reading of any other book. Heck, I was hard pressed to make a connection from this book to the others in the series other than the fact that they share Nich.

Nich Mordant is a student of pagan studies who desperately wants to get his hands on a legendary treasure that was hidden away by a famous master of the occult. The master intended the treasure for his daughter and left her clues in his various occult possessions. Unfortunately when the occult master passed away, his daughter had no interest in the occult and is now selling the items at auction. Nich wants to gather the items, decipher the riddle and obtain unimaginable occult knowledge.

Standing in Nich’s way is the main character of the book, Anderson Croom. Croom is a wealthy playboy and spanker of women who thinks the legendary treasure would be fun to find. He buys what he can and then uses his charm, cock and spanking hands to get a hold of the other items. He is doing this on a lark because when you’re insanely rich, you got to do something other than fuck and eat.

This was a really fun book. I tend to read through erotica books slowly as they are often 80% sex and 20% plot but I never felt that way about this book. It is a caper book with two worthy enemies at odds with each other. They constantly sabotage each other and add complications to each other’s quest. It was a fun read that just happened to have a lot of kinky sex.

Croom is assisted by a submissive girlfriend and a loyal butler as well as all the power that wealth brings you. Nich has his super loyal hippie girlfriend and some minor magical powers. The inevitable swap of sexual partners happens as each try to get the upper hand on the other. It is the rare erotica book where every character involved is interesting.

My only complaint is that Nich and Croom do not share equal time in the book. This is Croom’s book and he is a lovable bastard but I wish I saw more of Nich.

I should also point out that the book’s cover has a warning system. They want you to know that there is spanking, bondage and the occult, but they didn’t find it necessary to point that there is a urine in mouth scene.

I give it Four out of Five Pam Griers.

Star Wench by Anna Anthropy is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book that details the heroic Star Wench trying to take down the highly erotic and highly dominant Queen of Space.

You have no chance of success however. In fact, instead of the usual complex decision trees of other COYA books, Anna Anthropy skips all of that and gives you ONE choice: Pick a page, and see how you will die. Every death will be sexy, grim and hilarious.

I’m pretty impressed with this approach. Most COYA books focus on empowering the reader or challenging them until they find the right solution. Star Wench has no interest in empowering the reader. This is an exercise in narrative domination. This is placing the reader in an ultimately submissive role. Your character will die, over and over again. Success is judged solely on whether you are killed by the Queen of Space herself instead of one of her many flunkies. This is purity.

Now that you know that you will die, just how fun are the deaths? They are pretty damn fun in my opinion. The Queen of Space is a terrible tyrant with a thousand kinks. A sense of Flash Gordon silliness pervades everything. You are never simply killed by a laser beam. Instead, you, and the planet you are standing on are killed by orbital lasers. Nudity, bondage and groping are frequent themes. Each choice is a mini-story that could easily be a full short story on their own.

If you love my character Erishella, then you have to get this book. I am insanely jealous that I didn’t think of it first.

I give it Five out of Five Pam Griers