Licked : seven tales of oral pleasure : a review

As Adrea Kore explains, in her interview with editor Jillian Boyd: ‘Going down’ connotes the Underworld: descending beneath. Basements, underwater caves, places of darkness and mystery… Venturing into the unknown, we yearn for a little danger, a little adventure, but sometimes also treasure, and discovery.

This anthology is devoted to the delights of sexual scent and juices slick, to our impulse to lose ourselves in another, to the luscious lapping of a lover’s cream.

Kinky

Rob Rosen rises to the challenge of defining kink, in ‘Sanitised For Your Pleasure’. His futuristic, dystopian setting lends itself well to contemplation of how sexual ‘norms’ are shaped by cultural trends. In his world, pills are popped to eliminate anything deemed unsavoury, from body odour and body hair, to bad breath and dandruff. Eventually, babies are born without these ‘offensive’ extras. He imagines a society in which the human organism has no scent of its own, and no flavour. In such a setting, to seek out sex with smell and taste becomes a fetish in itself. Finding an arse crack tickled by hair takes the protagonist to heady heights of arousal. This is a clever celebration of the human body, in its all sweaty, hairy glory.

Intense

One of my favourite writers of erotic fiction, Adrea Kore, explores the torture of desire, of compulsion and addiction, in ‘Wet Satin Plaything’. She writes not only to arouse but to challenge us intellectually and emotionally. Her cleverly embroidered story of revenge is haunting, its prose woven with poetic refrain. Each sentence is a perfect melody in itself. Meanwhile, her descriptions of oral sex are unsurpassed. I was left dry-mouthed and anticipatory.

Joyous

In ‘Rip’s Reward’, Marie Piper gave me my first ever reading of ‘Western style erotica’ and I found it utterly charming, as well as more than a little arousing. Marie truly had me rooting for her characters’ happiness.

Intimate

Robin Watergrove’s confiding narrator voice, in ‘Just Thirsty’, bathes us in tender, sensuous prose: We’re unmoored; no voices now, too far off shore to make sense of each other’s words. I rock against her body and she pulses back against mine. Swimming in the smell of her, soaked into the sheets.

 

Witty

Dale Cameron Lowry’s ‘Sucker for Love’ begins by musing humorously on the attraction of certain flavours of the body, and his early introduction to the notion of oral pleasure: I found out about oral sex for the first time like many children my age did: by listening to BBC World Service over breakfast… it was the year U.S. President Bill Clinton scandalized the American citizenry with his sexual shenanigans. Our protagonist’s mother explains that it’s an acquired taste, like beer: ‘Grown-ups like to taste their lovers.’ she says. His childhood-self scoffs: ‘Beer smelled like wee. Genitals made wee. Never mind what anuses did. I didn’t want any of it near my mouth.’ As the tale unfolds, it is tender and romantic, satisfying and whimsical.

Wistful

Suanne Schafer, in ‘Feeding Her’ gives us a poignant story of how illness (and mastectomy) can change our self-image and others’ perception of us. Showing a talent for penning ‘believable’ characters, Suanne unfolds a tale with sensitivity and emotional depth.

Mysterious

In ‘Vapour, Venom, Oleander’, Jessica Taylor conjures ancient Greece, as her prophetic Sibyl of Delphi interprets the fumes of the Oracle, advising Romulus on the founding of Rome.

Revelatory

Let go your inhibitions and inhabit your senses. Embrace these tales of salt-sweet delight and, in so doing, discover oral pleasures anew.

As Adrea Kore invites us: ‘Get Licked. You know you want to…’

Edited by Jill Boyd, the edition is available here.