Review Tuesday: Chemical [se]X 2: Just One More - #anthology #erotica #aphrodisiac #ReviewTuesday

Chemical [se]X 2: Just One More
Passion Works Press, 2019

Which is better: sex, or chocolate?

You know that’s a trick question, right? Because why should you ever have to choose? For one thing, everyone knows that sex and chocolate go together like Laurel and Hardy – peanut butter and jelly – Batman and Robin – hamburgers and fries – love and marriage – okay, scratch that one! Certainly, erotic stories featuring chocolate aren’t exactly new. The sensual decadence of good chocolate almost naturally suggests other varieties of pleasure. Consuming chocolate can be used as a kind of foreplay, one form of indulgence leading to another.

But what if chocolate actually had aphrodisiac properties? A secret ingredient that reliably kindled irresistible lust? This is the unifying premise of Chemical [se]X 2: Just One More, a new erotica anthology edited by Oleander Plume, Dr. J. and Mischa Eliot, and published by Passion Works Press. Each of the thirteen authors represented in this delicious collection starts with this basic assumption – aphrodisiac chocolates that actually work – and explores the repercussions.

You might think this common plot element would lead to a sameness among the stories. On the contrary, the tales in Chemical [se]X 2 present a wide range of voices, situations and especially, sexual orientations. In “Beast”, Angora Shade creates an uptight, perfectionist heroine whose careful plans for an outdoor seduction disintegrate in the face of pure, literal, animal passion. In Sally Bend’s “Vanilla Frosting”, a dominant male uses the aphrodisiac sweets to pry his shy twink roommate out of the closet and into his bed. Ria Restrepo’s protagonist gets stuck in an elevator in “Elevator Confidential”, with the much older man she’s desired for decades – plus a convenient supply of the wickedly lust-inducing chocolates. F. Leanora Sullivan uses a company wine and cheese – and chocolate – event to break through the barriers between a career woman and her annoying co-worker in “Team Building”. Dr. J and Mischa Eliot pen tales of sizzling lesbian lust in “My Blu Valentine” and “Because She Hates Me”. I particularly enjoyed the characters in the latter story, a butch biker chick and her trouble-prone femme housemate, each of whom believes she’s hated by the other. Oleander Plume gives us a gorgeous homoerotic encounter between a famous black athlete and his skillful Hispanic tailor in “Well-Suited”. There are indeed times when being dressed is sexier than being naked.

While in many cases the notorious chocolates lubricate (so to speak) relationships between acquaintances, in some stories they bring strangers together. “For the Record” by Kristi Hancock is an example. The company responsible for the aphrodisiac chocolates (“Acme”, just like in the Road Runner/Coyote cartoons!) is testing their efficacy. A woman who volunteers finds herself nearly out of her mind with sexual need, so much so that she picks up the first guy she meets. However, her zipless fuck partner has his own secrets. Rachel Woe’s “Making Waves” gives us a warm-hearted but transient encounter between a middle-aged, overworked hotel housekeeper and a barely-twenty rich kid, a brief connection that nevertheless changes them both.

“Come Away with the Sweet Fairies” by Jayne Renault and “Season’s Change” by Delilah Night are two of the most unusual tales in the collection. The latter is a lusty revisit to the myth of Persephone. The former is set at an outdoor midsummer festival called Kablamfest, reminiscent of Woodstock or Burning Man, where sexual fluidity and magic reign. It brought me back to the days of my youth, before AIDS or terrorism or global warning, when sex was pure joy no matter who happened to be your partner.

I haven’t mentioned every story; I want to leave some for you to discover on your own. Overall, this is a fun collection that manages to transcend what might seem a rather narrow theme to provide a delightful diversity of characters, perspectives and orientations. Every story is well-written, and the editing is superb. The manuscript I read was labeled as an uncorrected proof, but it was much cleaner than many published books I read. In the entire 144 pages, I noticed only one minor typographic error. And as an editor myself, I would notice mistakes if they were there.

Unfortunately, I happen to be allergic to chocolate. (Really!) This anthology gave me a vivid sense of what I’m missing!

The Love of a Lifetime

By Lynne Connolly (Guest Blogger)

Coffee and tea and even hot chocolate are so ubiquitous to our world that we hardly think about it. But it wasn’t always that way.

Coffee and tea were introduced into England in the mid seventeenth century. Legend has it that it was popularised by the queen of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza, who brought her tea drinking ways from her native Portugal. Whatever, it soon became extremely popular and it’s never lost its appeal.

But they didn’t just take to it because it was “nice.” It was a welcome way of imbibing water safely. We tend to forget that until mid Victorian times, it just wasn’t safe to drink water. It carried bacteria, and while our ancestors didn’t know about them, they knew the results. Drinking water made you ill. There were two main ways of making it safe. You could boil it or you could brew, distill or use it in the fermentation process. That explains why wells containing safe water were so precious and carefully guarded, too.

Boiled water tastes horrible. There’s no way anyone would want to live on that, and the flavouring doesn’t really help a lot. So most people, men, women and children, drank beer. The usual everyday beer, known as “small beer” wasn’t very alcoholic, but was an acceptable drink. In the West country, they liked cider. In Scotland, they made beer from barley. Whatever was available. Strictly ale, because beer has to have hops in it, but it wasn’t very long before the hop industry got under way and oast houses were opening hither and yon. Distilled water, plus a few extra ingredients led to spirits, brandy and gin for the most part (whisky came in later, in the Victorian age), and fortified wine like port and sherry.

But isn’t it nice to sit with a hot drink on a cold day? Our ancestors, for the most part, didn’t do this. That is, until coffee, tea and chocolate (as a drink) came in. Coffee houses soon sprang up around the culture. Men only establishments, apart from the women who might serve in them, they were open to anyone who looked respectable. They opened in major cities in competition with the inns, and soon started to specialise, especially in London. They became places of business, and soon men engaged in certain aspects of business congregated in specific coffee houses. Lloyds was for shipping and insurance. The Cocoa-Tree was popular with Tories and Jacobites (later it became a private gambling club). Will’s Coffee house on the corner of Bow Street collected writers. Dryden’s chair was kept there.

At home, women took to tea drinking. Tea sets were delicate, precious objects, and until the late eighteenth century, teacups, or tea-dishes, as they were known, didn’t have handles. They were held by their broad bases instead. Porcelain was delicate and precious, and it was a measure of your gentility as to whether you dared to pour in the hot tea before you added the milk, because the porcelain cracked and broke. If you could afford to, you would put the tea in first.

As the dinner hour was pushed back and the gap between breakfast and dinner became wider, the need for a mid-afternoon snack increased, and so ladies would hold salons where they served tea and delicacies. Some of these became the centre of literary and even political excellence, with famous hostesses like Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu presiding over a distinguished group of poets, playwrights and novelists.

Later, tea and coffee became important weapons in the armoury of the nonconformist teetotaller. It became possible to eschew alcohol altogether, and some of the most famous coffee and tea companies in the world were begun by Quakers or nonconformists who wanted to either limit the amount of alcohol imbibed, especially by the lower classes, or cut it out altogether. Out of this came one of the most important developments womankind has ever known: chocolate bars. First produced by Fry, they were seen as an interesting addition to the drinking sort chocolate. The company, founded by a particularly prominent Quaker family from the Shoreditch Community, also saw the bars as a good way of keeping chocolate in less than hygienic situations. By this time, the first half of the nineteenth century, tea and coffee were seen as part of everyday life, no longer luxuries, and had supplanted small beer as the usual drink of all classes, from the cobbler to the King.

And for me, coffee and tea led to the longest love affair of my life. When I was nine years old, we did a project on coffee and tea. It included production and manufacture. We started with a slide show, always a treat in our school, and I watched, enraptured, when they put up a print of a coffee house, the one I’ve put above. Right then and there I saw the place of my dreams, I saw a world I wanted to enter and I was desperate to know more about it, experience it, be part of it. I wanted a time machine, and I knew I’d been born in the wrong century.

Later, I learned better. I could live in the eighteenth century, but there are some things I’d find it very hard to live without. The vote, for instance. Still, at that exact moment, I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with the eighteenth century. Later, when I went to university, I deliberately chose Tudor history, not Georgian, because I didn’t want the magic to die. It was my secret. But the passion never died, never went away and today it’s as strong as ever. So strong that I write books set in the middle of that glorious time, and every time a new book comes out about that era, I buy it. I’m more passionate about the mid Georgian period, the 1750’s, than I am about the Regency, so I write books set then.

I can’t see it ever stopping.

Bio: Lynne Connolly lives in England with her family and her mews, a cat called Jack. She spends her time writing and filling her collection of doll’s houses. After acceptance by her first publisher she hasn’t looked back. She has over 40 books out, and plans for more. She writes in the paranormal romance, contemporary romance and historical romance genres and she likes to add a lot of steam!

She writes for Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing, Carina Press, Loose-Id Publishing, Total E-bound, Champagne Publishing, Uncial Press and Awe-Struck Books.

Where you can find Lynne:

Newsletter group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lynneconnolly/join

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/lynneconnolly

Email: lynneconnollyuk [at] yahoo.co.uk

Website: http://lynneconnolly.com

Blogs:

http://goodbadandunread.com

http://historicalromanceuk.blogspot.com

Publishers:

Total-E-Bound: http://www.total-e-bound.com/authordetail.asp?A_ID=146

Ellora’s Cave: http://www.jasminejade.com/m-332-lynne-connolly.aspx

Samhain Publishing: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/lynne-connolly-pa-79.html

Loose Id: http://www.loose-id.com/Our-Authors/Lynne-Connolly/