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apostrophen's review
2.0
I reviewed this for Erotica Revealed.
A couple of years ago, when I first bought my Kobo and had purchased only one book for it, I ended up stuck in an airport for about six hours. I’d finished the book I’d bought, so I started to peruse the 100 free books (copyright expired classics, for the most part) that had come bundled on the device. I came across Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and realized I hadn’t read it in years, and decided to give it a go.
It certainly didn’t fill all six of the hours (Jane Austen had the honor of using up most of them) but my jaunt through Alice’s Adventures reminded me of how – as a child – I’d read it a chapter at a time over the course of a week or two as a bedtime tale. In my head, it was in many ways a collection of short stories – each chapter was very much separate from the last, and the language was over-the-top and sort of forced and fun in a way that I enjoyed.
I had to stop and remind myself of all of that when I began reading Adventures in Fetishland. Within the first page or two, I was a little worried. The language seemed a bit overwrought:
As she made her stately progress across the tiled floor she mused on the aptness of the symbolism that reflected the extremities of the world she inhabited and held sway over: darkness and light, cruelty and kindness, pain and pleasure, humiliation and reward.
Thus we meet the Red Queen of the tale in the prologue. The prose here was a bit overwhelming and somehow discordant. I won’t lie – it had me noticing specific word choices and wondering how deliberate they were. It knocked me a bit out of the narrative. By the end of the prologue, we’ve met the Red Queen and have been let into the crux of the tale: somewhere out there (in our real world, we’re left to assume) there’s a young woman who will be the ideal slave submissive (and yet also a bit dominant, in the sense that the Red Queen could command her to dominate her other slaves) and the Red Queen is ready to go get her back.
Yes, back. This woman (I was waiting for her to be referred to as “Alice”) has already been in the Queen’s Nemesisland once before.
So let’s meet Alice. Or, rather, Kim. Kim is working at a “massage parlor” (nudge, nudge) and is dealing with a pretty nonverbal (though muscular and smooth) client.
Kim turned her naked client onto his back and knelt over him. She had to admit his erection was impressive, he certainly had no problems in that department. She leant over him so that her cleavage, squeezing out of her tight leopard-skin print bra, was hanging over his face and his gaze was drawn to her heaving breasts.
Again, that language that seems just a bit “off” was distracting me. By the end of the first chapter, there’s been an attempted anal rape, and the arrival of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the rescue/abduction of Kim.
I’m going to break here to put in that I have a personal frustration with attempted rape (or rape committed) in erotica. Here’s the thing: I personally just can’t find anything titillating about rape. Period. So whenever I stumble across this sort of scene, it hits that particular trigger for me, and I get frustrated. I understand the literary idea of the “rescue” and the feelings that can develop between the rescued (almost) victim and the rescuer, but I just find it a real turn-off, and not too likely. Almost being raped strikes me as not the turn-on it’s often presented to be in a narrative.
That side note aside, Slave Nano doesn’t follow through in that regard: Kim is not so grateful to her rescuers that she falls into bed with them, so that trope was avoided.
What the chapter did do, however, was remind me of what I was reading – this is an erotic piece following the style (and some structure) of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The lightbulb went on for me when Kim, after almost being raped, turns to see that her rescuers (who’ve clubbed her attempted rapist over the head with a pan) are standing behind her.
She’s naked. She’s just almost been raped, and this is her reaction:
This reminded Kim of something. She racked her brains (sic), trying to recall stories from her childhood. Then she remembered – Tweeledum and Tweedledee; they were characters from Alice Through the Looking Glass. How odd. What could they possibly be doing in a massage parlour in Manchester?
It was the “How odd?” that did it for me. This is a tale about to be told in the same – more or less – style of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice didn’t pause much when she nearly fell to her death or awful creatures attacked her or yelled at her. She sort of took it in stride, though she often had a bit of a sharp tongue and berated them for not making sense. Kim was Alice, and in this version of events, nothing like a potential rape was going to derail her from realizing that these two rescuers were, well, kind of out of place.
I started to ease a bit more into the tale after that. The language, the odd reactions of those involved, it all suited a bit more when I filtered it through the lens of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I started looking at the narrative on its own strengths, and found it easier to get past the language to do so. The adverbs and adjectives didn’t startle as much as before, and the overall effect was a kind of gauzy, dreamy approach to a fetish-laden erotic story of Kim and the Red Queen.
Basically, the story follows in an Alice fashion – chapters are new scenes, for the most part, and the reader is treated to a variety of fetishes, as the title would lead you to expect. There’s definitely some furry content (the hare, the cat, quite a few of the animals are sort of manimals, though their descriptions are often not quite flushed out enough to hand you the full image, allowing you to create your own borderline between fur and flesh), there’s a lot of bondage, some mummification, and – here’s something we don’t see often enough – the women are often in the dominant role. We have some teacher-student, some nurse play, basically scene after scene through the fetish scope, with a heavy emphasis on role-play through uniform and costume choice, and bondage.
Between those chapters, however, is the part of the tale that I thought had the most cleverness. We start to unfold the mystery of who exactly the Red Queen is, along with her enemies, and there’s a historical content here that I really did find interesting. As the tale unfolds, there’s a kind of paganism and feminism that is quite engaging, and learning Kim’s role in all of this is ultimately a nice ribbon-on-top of the whole package, and was maybe I place I would have liked to have spent more time.
Adventures in Fetishland is a bit of a mixed bag. The scenes are there, and once you get your head past some of the prose style – understand, I think this is a very purposeful echoing of the style of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – I think it can be a fun read for those into the style and the slightly “wacky” feel that presents. The “B” plot of the history of the Red Queen and Kim is engaging. The scenes are erotic – though the language can sometimes disconnect the reader a bit as it seems somehow oddly put. I liked the denouement well enough, but the inclusion of the potential rapist in the tale at not just one place but two left me a bit sour – but that’s my hang-up, and not necessarily an issue for other readers.
I’d honestly suggest you take a quick perusal of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland if you’re not familiar with it, or if it has been a while since you read it. Somehow, having recently (enough) experienced the book made my easing into the language style of Fetishland less awkward. It’s a transition that works for the tale but I think could work against readers. I leave that determination up to you.
A couple of years ago, when I first bought my Kobo and had purchased only one book for it, I ended up stuck in an airport for about six hours. I’d finished the book I’d bought, so I started to peruse the 100 free books (copyright expired classics, for the most part) that had come bundled on the device. I came across Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and realized I hadn’t read it in years, and decided to give it a go.
It certainly didn’t fill all six of the hours (Jane Austen had the honor of using up most of them) but my jaunt through Alice’s Adventures reminded me of how – as a child – I’d read it a chapter at a time over the course of a week or two as a bedtime tale. In my head, it was in many ways a collection of short stories – each chapter was very much separate from the last, and the language was over-the-top and sort of forced and fun in a way that I enjoyed.
I had to stop and remind myself of all of that when I began reading Adventures in Fetishland. Within the first page or two, I was a little worried. The language seemed a bit overwrought:
As she made her stately progress across the tiled floor she mused on the aptness of the symbolism that reflected the extremities of the world she inhabited and held sway over: darkness and light, cruelty and kindness, pain and pleasure, humiliation and reward.
Thus we meet the Red Queen of the tale in the prologue. The prose here was a bit overwhelming and somehow discordant. I won’t lie – it had me noticing specific word choices and wondering how deliberate they were. It knocked me a bit out of the narrative. By the end of the prologue, we’ve met the Red Queen and have been let into the crux of the tale: somewhere out there (in our real world, we’re left to assume) there’s a young woman who will be the ideal slave submissive (and yet also a bit dominant, in the sense that the Red Queen could command her to dominate her other slaves) and the Red Queen is ready to go get her back.
Yes, back. This woman (I was waiting for her to be referred to as “Alice”) has already been in the Queen’s Nemesisland once before.
So let’s meet Alice. Or, rather, Kim. Kim is working at a “massage parlor” (nudge, nudge) and is dealing with a pretty nonverbal (though muscular and smooth) client.
Kim turned her naked client onto his back and knelt over him. She had to admit his erection was impressive, he certainly had no problems in that department. She leant over him so that her cleavage, squeezing out of her tight leopard-skin print bra, was hanging over his face and his gaze was drawn to her heaving breasts.
Again, that language that seems just a bit “off” was distracting me. By the end of the first chapter, there’s been an attempted anal rape, and the arrival of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the rescue/abduction of Kim.
I’m going to break here to put in that I have a personal frustration with attempted rape (or rape committed) in erotica. Here’s the thing: I personally just can’t find anything titillating about rape. Period. So whenever I stumble across this sort of scene, it hits that particular trigger for me, and I get frustrated. I understand the literary idea of the “rescue” and the feelings that can develop between the rescued (almost) victim and the rescuer, but I just find it a real turn-off, and not too likely. Almost being raped strikes me as not the turn-on it’s often presented to be in a narrative.
That side note aside, Slave Nano doesn’t follow through in that regard: Kim is not so grateful to her rescuers that she falls into bed with them, so that trope was avoided.
What the chapter did do, however, was remind me of what I was reading – this is an erotic piece following the style (and some structure) of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The lightbulb went on for me when Kim, after almost being raped, turns to see that her rescuers (who’ve clubbed her attempted rapist over the head with a pan) are standing behind her.
She’s naked. She’s just almost been raped, and this is her reaction:
This reminded Kim of something. She racked her brains (sic), trying to recall stories from her childhood. Then she remembered – Tweeledum and Tweedledee; they were characters from Alice Through the Looking Glass. How odd. What could they possibly be doing in a massage parlour in Manchester?
It was the “How odd?” that did it for me. This is a tale about to be told in the same – more or less – style of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice didn’t pause much when she nearly fell to her death or awful creatures attacked her or yelled at her. She sort of took it in stride, though she often had a bit of a sharp tongue and berated them for not making sense. Kim was Alice, and in this version of events, nothing like a potential rape was going to derail her from realizing that these two rescuers were, well, kind of out of place.
I started to ease a bit more into the tale after that. The language, the odd reactions of those involved, it all suited a bit more when I filtered it through the lens of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I started looking at the narrative on its own strengths, and found it easier to get past the language to do so. The adverbs and adjectives didn’t startle as much as before, and the overall effect was a kind of gauzy, dreamy approach to a fetish-laden erotic story of Kim and the Red Queen.
Basically, the story follows in an Alice fashion – chapters are new scenes, for the most part, and the reader is treated to a variety of fetishes, as the title would lead you to expect. There’s definitely some furry content (the hare, the cat, quite a few of the animals are sort of manimals, though their descriptions are often not quite flushed out enough to hand you the full image, allowing you to create your own borderline between fur and flesh), there’s a lot of bondage, some mummification, and – here’s something we don’t see often enough – the women are often in the dominant role. We have some teacher-student, some nurse play, basically scene after scene through the fetish scope, with a heavy emphasis on role-play through uniform and costume choice, and bondage.
Between those chapters, however, is the part of the tale that I thought had the most cleverness. We start to unfold the mystery of who exactly the Red Queen is, along with her enemies, and there’s a historical content here that I really did find interesting. As the tale unfolds, there’s a kind of paganism and feminism that is quite engaging, and learning Kim’s role in all of this is ultimately a nice ribbon-on-top of the whole package, and was maybe I place I would have liked to have spent more time.
Adventures in Fetishland is a bit of a mixed bag. The scenes are there, and once you get your head past some of the prose style – understand, I think this is a very purposeful echoing of the style of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – I think it can be a fun read for those into the style and the slightly “wacky” feel that presents. The “B” plot of the history of the Red Queen and Kim is engaging. The scenes are erotic – though the language can sometimes disconnect the reader a bit as it seems somehow oddly put. I liked the denouement well enough, but the inclusion of the potential rapist in the tale at not just one place but two left me a bit sour – but that’s my hang-up, and not necessarily an issue for other readers.
I’d honestly suggest you take a quick perusal of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland if you’re not familiar with it, or if it has been a while since you read it. Somehow, having recently (enough) experienced the book made my easing into the language style of Fetishland less awkward. It’s a transition that works for the tale but I think could work against readers. I leave that determination up to you.
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