Book Review: Silver Moon by Catherine Lundoff

'Lo People,




I am so overdue for this review. You ever read a book or watch a movie where you were yelling at the main character? Grrl what are you doing? Yup. Becca Thornton did that me. I remember hearing about the book from the author. I'm definitely in the target audience being perimenopausal, a female, and a fang-carrying, lifelong member of the shifter tribe. I am down with the Werefolk. And I'm heteroflexible enough that I can enjoy lesbian characters discovering themselves. Her Tangh-i-ness's motto is be who you be. Love is Love. Anyhoo….


I appreciate Silver Moon too for offering a different vision of femaleness. Too often, the woman as a warrior, or even viewed as an elder, as a social force driven to protect and nuture takes a second stage to Romantic entanglement. There is light Romance in Silver Moon. There's also an interesting depiction of the poison of self-hate.


8/20 Update: (The character has been renamed. The writer is a true ally. She understood why the adjustment was needed and took action)

My one quibble with the earlier version of Silver Moon had been in the use of a goddess's name for a difficult character. The antagonist took it as their "warrior" name. The character says, "Remember me: I am the wind that brings change."

As someone who is a shrine keeper in a West African tradition, seeing that name in this context just tossed me out of the story just as Voudun practitioners cringe at non-devotees' depiction of their faith I had a reaction. Uhhhh...Ile Ife, we have a problem. Make of my reaction what you will. Please remember the I found the remainder of this story satisfying and absolutely worthy of a re-read.


*Spoiler Alert*


Her Tangh-i-ness greatly appreciates pithy plot summaries. However, for those who must have a virgin reading experience, read no further, and eyeball elsewhere.



*Spoiler Alert End*



Becca works in a hardware store in a town called Wolf's Point, is a member of a local women's club, and is going through the change. She's also feeling feelings for her female neighbor after her divorce from a man. It's Becca's first time considering that she is attracted to her own sex.

Becca learns the women's club she's part of isn't just a case of running with the wolves. The women become wolves. Becca finds this handy when she has to defend a kidnapped boy from a child predator. My girl Becca dispatches the predator human and brings the boy to safety. Yay!

I loved that Shelly Peterson, the Alpha of Wolf's point, was a Native American woman. I loved that Lizzie Blackhawk, Shelly's cousin was the town Deputy. Even the female antagonist with the goddess's name is a Native woman. So can we talk about Erin? "She grinned her slow lazy smile that always made Becca think about cowboys. Cowgirls. Whatever. Maybe it was her neighbor's long lean body or her short-cropped graying hair." So I'm looking at Erin too and I'm liking what I see. Nice to know Becca has good taste. Erin is the love interest by the way.

Becca and her pack have to stand firm against the machinations of the female antagonist and her crew. The crew calls themselves Nesters. Becca even runs away from what she's become and the pack. That lasts two minutes. Becca's running away earns the first of Her Tangh-iness's severe talking tos. Grrrrl, have you lost your mind? Becca returns to Wolf's Point after a think.

Becca meets the female antagonist with the goddess-name and learns the woman believes the women wolves killed her parents. Erin, Shelly, and the rest of the female elders of Wolf's Point and members of the pack show up to welcome Becca back. Lizzie brings Becca to the secret painted cave where the ancient spirits first put the magic into Wolf's Point that transforms its women into wolves. Becca learns she might lose her home to an ex-husband interested in selling it off so he could support himself and a new pregnant wife. The women of Wolf's Point decide to assist her in keeping it and to train her in using her new-found transformative powers.

The Nesters burn the women's club building down. The antagonist with the goddess-name turns out to be another of Shelly and Lizzie's cousins. She also has a drug that can overpower the urge to change into wolves. Complicated. Complicated. Becca commits herself to the fight when she tells Erin, "You're going to make me the best damn werewolf this town has ever seen."

Meeting with the Pack at the secret painted cave sends Becca into a panic attack but Shelly and the others guide Becca through it. Becca can do cool partial transformations: not quite wolf and not quite human and not always on the full moon. Becca makes some poor decisions (which does not include her first kiss with Erin) and earns being put under watch by her Alpha Shelly. The Nesters escalate their efforts to recruit new members by forcibly "changing" them.

Shelly the Alpha disappears. The Nesters have an injectable "cure." Becca finds herself on the receiving end of a needle. The antagonist with the goddess name says, "I see that you were wavering, but I knew we could save you. And we did. We will. You'll see: it'll be better now. We'll keep helping you." Becca gets herself taken prisoner by the Nesters in a bid to find out where they might have stowed Shelly.

She escapes and reunites with the Pack. Becca finds Shelly and Erin. The Pack elders have given Shelly and Erin the means to counter the Nesters effort to halt the change. Becca, Shelly, and Erin return to the cave with the painted walls. Together, they wield the magic to overcome the antagonist with the goddess-name and her male companion. Erin is wounded yet again. Becca finds that although the magic can defined against Nesters, it can't halt the sale of her home. But she could always move in with her next door neighbor Erin couldn't she?

C'mon, this can't be the last we've seen of Becca and the wolf-women of Wolf's Point…. I swear I can hear howling in the distance.


Note: This copy of Silver Moon was a hard copy purchased by the reviewer. Her Tangh-i-ness usually reviews on a for-the-love basis. No lucre has been involved.

Book Review: The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian

Her Tangh-i-ness Does read other things besides Erotica. But since we're on the subject—there's always time for more recreational Smut. Creatives are some of the most highly-sexed beings on the planet; I mean near everything they produce is the result of an orgasm of the Creative Mind.

Take this M. Christian guy, for example. Yeah. Yeah. I started with his short story collection Skin Effect. This guy, he just keeps writing more…more...reasons to moisturize the underthings or try and hide the evidence of stimulation upon the erogenous zone of choice. There's lots of male on female action, female on female, a genuinely happy foursome (two males make out with the females and also each other). For pure male on male, do refer to M.Christian's other short story collection, one being, Dirty Words.

However, for the People of Color in the Reading Audience, be aware this collection does contain Triggers. These are Sistah-shaped ones both golden, black, and brown. I hear ya'll saying just what does she mean? Read and find out. Just remember Her Tangh-i-ness saw that the work went there and got to the end of the book. Just saying. By the way, she kept reading other M. Christian works. Consider what the author has to say about himself: "For me, being a pioneer in this area, I feel like I have to create my own respect, in a way. I'm like a missionary – at first no matter what tribe I visit, I get the hairy eyeball." So it's obviously time to start eyeballing this dude until he creams in his pants or something.

To make it easy for potential readers of this collection, Her Tangh-i-ness will return to the following rating system that came in mighty handy when describing M. Christian's Skin Effect and other works.

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* This means the sexiness might have to grow on you.

WT *Wet* Self-explanatory. No?

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Requires immediate action after the story climax.

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* Try this one at home, Folks.


*Spoiler Alert*

Her Tangh-i-ness greatly appreciates pithy plot summaries. However, for those who must have a virgin reading experience, read no further, and eyeball elsewhere.


*Spoiler Alert End*


STATE

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. She-Machine meets with man. The idea of exciting the man makes the She-machine cum. And when it's over and done with all the She-machine wants to do is sleep? Ok. Can we point to this story as an example of reverse gender post-coital physiology? Maybe the real reason to read this story can be found in the music of this sentence: "Too quick, maybe, too sudden, probably, but he was hanging way down, his breathing was quick and deep, his legs were columns of meat and tension." What does ya'll think?

HACK WORK

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. This is the story where Her Tangh-i-ness counted to a thousand before she turned the page to the next story. Yup. This is the one of the Oh-No-He-Didn't-Go-There! stories. As the dear, departed writing instructor, Blake Snyder of Save the Cat fame once told me, Her Tangh-i-ness Ain't in the Target Audience. Those that are—ya'll know who you is when you read it. A female shares her consciousness with her paying fares and finds herself taking a young Black woman for a session with a riding crop.

WINGED MEMORY

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. Dusk, a desperate young man named without prospects sells off painful sexual memories in order to afford the cyber-whore of his wet dreams. Each time he does this. He keeps losing more and more of his essential self until the only thing left is to turn the tables on the memory merchant to whom he dealt all his unrecoverables.

EULOGY

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Jeff and Julie, two survivors of a broken triangle comfort one another rather orally. Find more of those musical sentences here. "Our breaths synchronized, and we steamed together like a pair of heavy engines." This is the second of the mouth-whore stories.

BUTTERFLIE$

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Fiction. M/F Action. Virtual sex for a female character where thee division between self and other and even male and female gets blurred. Can we say—extreme nipple action? The point of this story is to demonstrate the unbelievable roller coaster that only a Total mindf*ck can deliver.

EVERYTHING BUT THE SMELL OF LILIES

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. This is the second of the Oh-No-He-Didn't-Go-There! stories. The POV flips from third-person into two first-person streams of consciousness: one is the ambulance driver with an unsavory Kink and the other is the biracial (Black & an unnamed race) hooker whose talent lies in appearing to die so her paying johns can get their f*cks on. You guessed it. The ambulance driver decides upon helping himself to a freebie. The upshot is that Jasmine, the hooker, is the only character still breathing by the story's end.

FULLY ACCESSORIZED

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Fiction. F/F Action. Grrrls getting it on. Val and Cox can Do it much better because Val is a sexy cyborg with the serious Enthusiast level of an attachment. And Cox knows her way around clitoral accessories as well. There's a little something for the fisters and the f*ckers out there.

BABY BLUEBELLE

WT *Wet* M/F Action. Gen-Xers in the audience remember Nightrider and the intelligent car KITT? Throw in a car chase and oral sex while driving with a virtual babe and maybe Roger should have tried harder to stay on the right side of the law.

THE NEW MOTOR

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* M/F Action. Inspired Engineer meets with Spurned Woman near Lynn, Lynn that city of Sin. Man's love of gadgetry clashes with a scheming mistress. Didn't Spear remember the old saw about female fury?

GUERNICA

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* In a Society where Kink is Capital Offense, Kinky men and women gather together to act out their secret, forbidden desires. By the end of their night and the end of their story reveal the very, realest thrills. This story is a political nightmare for open Kinksters.

HEARTBREAKER

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* F/F Action. What happens with an opponent who takes the struggle to the bedroom? Read on. Kusa the hardened female cop encounters a red-headed vixen called Nine. They fall into bed, Kusa busts Nine afterwards, but Nine lets the reader in on the mega-doublecross pulled off by the eponymous, gender-switching Heartbreaker

SWITCH

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* F/M Action. One could ask the career Submissive what brings her back again and again to the experience of being owned and point to this story as an explanation.

INTERCORE

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* M/F Action. Hmmmn. Public acts of indecency need an electronic eye, a digitsl peephole, to zoom in close and closer. This story holds up the assertion that a dildo is a girl's best friend. The best and most quake-tacular cums are the ones she can give herself.

TECHNOPHILE

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Cybernetic cock anyone? M/M Action. Young chicken (jailbait) meets with a doctored rooster. The boy birds connect in the only means left to them when the Long Thrust can't get it up. Another mouth-whore celebratory tale.

SKIN-EFFECT

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. Pepper the survivor of a "wilding" offers wounded veteran Lionel Guardino a new lease on Life as her jacked-up companion and the shiny, new enforcer of her revenge. Topping from Below.

SIGHT

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Aliens, called the Elgin, Cortez, a middle-aged, human artist, and Rosalinda, a young woman combine to complete the artist/aesthete/inspiration circuit.

THE SHOW

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Exhibitionists out there ought to know the pinnacle of erotic performance is conducted in the heart of the city that never sleeps. You didn't think they were going to do their porno in Philly didja?

THIN DOG

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* Action. Music and sex are always an irresistible combination. But the idea of hearing music along with the sensation of being made love to/loving your favorite rock hero/ine sounds like a recipe for making Woodstock, Lollapalooza, and South by Souwest Music Concert combined sit down.

THE BACHELOR MACHINE

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* M/F Action. An abandoned synthetic woman pays for weekly sex sessions with a human male. In her clinging to the sexual exchange as the prelude to emotional and social intercourse, the nameless android proves herself as human as the lovers who rejected get once she was no longer new.

EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL PAINTED DOLL

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. As a creative person, and a figure painter, I can appreciate M. Christian's fondness for combining artistic expression and arousal. And why not set this story also in that land of great opposites: public restraint and private passions: Japan. Makes this reader want to run and find a pretty, geisha-boi and have at him.

HOT DEFINITION

WT *Wet* F/F Action. Neko, another biracial: Asian and Black protagonist hopes to escape the sentient electronic Daemon pursuing her and her female lover. Neko makes it to the end of the story, but the Daemon has made off with the one person most precious to her.

NEW BEDFELLOWS: SEX & SCIENCE FICTION

The essays that seem to close out M. Christian collections are worth perusing for fertile, fiction-bent minds. Here is a conversation with the great Cecelia Tan and M. Christian waxing from what's wrong with much of the sex in SF to the future of Erotica. Even one disagrees with the suppositions, the essay makes for stimulating reading.


Note: This copy of The Bachelor Machine was an electronic edition provided by the author. Her Tangh-i-ness usually reviews on a for-the-love basis. No lucre has been involved.