There’s nothing like a long book that you don’t really like. I guess I could sum up my experience with “Gotta Have It” in those words and leave it but I’ll try to explain exactly why this book didn’t catch my fancy. I mean, there’s a cat on the cover, so that should count for something, right?
“Gotta Have It” promises to offer 69 stories of sudden sex, and while the sex may be sudden, it’s not all sudden fiction. That is, some of them are just a little longer than I like and we all know how I don’t like erotica that lasts longer than I do. And, honestly, I think the sheer number of stories is not working in this book’s favor. It appears bulky, especially because it’s shorter and squatter than any other erotica book I own. It’s ten times as big as Five Minute Erotica! Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed so much if I weren’t reviewing it but I felt the deadline pressing against me and was just trying to finish all the stories, one by one, and they kept blending together. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t remember anything about the first stories–there was just too much data to try to recall in one place. This would have been much better off as two volumes.
But it’s more than that because I found myself paging through and passing by more stories than I read. A lot of them just didn’t pull me in from the start and I couldn’t get into them by continuing on. I don’t like to waste my time so I skipped ahead. The problem is that the focus of these stories appears to be the writing rather than the sex or sexuality. They’re all spectacularly written and interesting as literature but not as erotica. It’s almost as though the sex is an afterthought in some of them.
There are well-written stories with a wide variety of subjects. The themes in this book include golden showers, sex with strangers, voyeurism, phone sex, gender play, online dating and Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla. In fact, Salome Wilde’s “Too Wondrous To Measure” is a fantastic tale about the giant reptile that I remember simply because it was weird. Call me old-fashioned but I just don’t get turned on by the guy. There are a mixture of gay, lesbian, bisexual and straight couplings but there’s a lot of monogamous sex that I just didn’t find particularly thrilling in “Gotta Have It.”
One of my favorite stories actually details the make-up sex of a married couple. Daniel Burnell’s “Ties That Bind” was interesting when I first read it. Yet, it’s not something that is so interesting or different that I remember it once the book leaves my hands. The same can be said for “Lucky Number Fifty-One” which follows a man who gets the chance to have sex with his favorite porn star and is able to impress her.
At the end of the day (or page or book), “Gotta Have It” Is simply not the best erotica collection I’ve read. It’s better than, say, X, because I like stories short but I have four or so anthologies on my nightstand that I found to be much more interesting. I don’t know if it’s the sole reason but I seem to really enjoy collections that Alison Tyler have edited and this one was edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. I’d recommend Five Minute Erotica if you want a short and sexy story. Some of those have left some pretty vivid memories in my mind.
