I warned you this might happen so I hope you are ready--today we read three stories by Nancy Kilpatrick which--I think--are going to be about women having sex with monsters! All courtesy of the internet archive, world's greatest website!
"The Case of the Demon Lover" (1996)
I'm reading this in The Best American Erotica: 1997, but I think it debuted in 1996's Noirotica: An Anthology of Erotic Crime Stories. Noirotica also features a story co-written by Poppy Z. Brite, whose "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves," and "Homewrecker" I liked. Noirotica also has a pretentious and hilarious introduction by editor Thomas Roche in which he talks about how Raymond Chandler is his inspiration and he is using erotica to reveal important truths about our hypocritical world. Sure, buddy.
Adrian hates all men! She won awards for being a great cop when she worked up in Philly, but now she is working in New Orleans, and her partner is a fat slob with a Southern accent whom she thinks looks like a toad. They are cruising around, looking for a man who has raped 24 women of all races and social classes, but it ain't easy, as none of the victims can offer any description of their assailant. Or maybe they are refusing to offer any description....
Adrian takes a walk, leaving her partner behind, and ends up in a cemetery. We learn a little about her background as daughter of a single mother and a person who is smarter and more competent than everybody else, and how she came to find men repellant. She discovers the rapist--the most beautiful man she has ever seen! He uses his magic powers to seduce her--she begs for him to take her, and she has over a dozen orgasms as he uses her! He is no rapist--all those two dozen women begged to be used by him just as our Adrian is begging! I guess the multi-page sex scene is meant to appeal to women who have fantasies of being submissive.
Even more than staking her vagina, this newly claimed territory left her feeling owned. She offered herself up to him in complete submission, and he accepted the offering as if it were his right to take her. As if she existed to be taken, which was how she felt.
The story ends with the indication that this man is now her master and they will meet again, she wearing whatever he tells her to wear and doing whatever he tells her to do. Adrian is the horniest woman this sexual athlete and erotic artist has ever met--she needs multiple treatments to achieve satisfaction!
This isn't bad for porn that flatters women's resentment of men at the same time it appeals to their desire to be dominated by men, especially if you like the idea of degrading sex in the dirt of a cemetery. A little copyediting would have helped, though--people generally don't say "gun handle," they say "pistol grip." We'll blame that on Thomas Roche.
"Sustenance" (1993)
This story debuted in 1993 in
After Hours, a small press magazine, and would be reprinted in
The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick. I'm reading it in M. Christian's
Eros ex machina: Eroticizing the Mechanical. Mr. Christian's book includes a story by prominent SF writer Mike Resnick, so don't think I am going far afield today in blogging about three pornographic stories--there is a lot of overlap in the world of genre, so this post is no more crazy than my posts about detective stories by Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner or Fredric Brown. The intro to
Eros ex machina is deliberately funny, a three page warning like the warnings you find in the manuals of appliances and electronics:
Neither Rhinoceros Books nor the editor of Eros ex machina: Eroticizing the Mechanical acknowledges responsibility for any accidental injuries resulting form the unauthorized and/or inappropriate use of this product.
"Sustenance" is the diary of a prisoner. Our narrator was raped by a robot in an alley (she had many orgasms) and imprisoned in a stone cell to be raped every 24 hours by a robot (she has many orgasms.) Life in the cell is so boring she comes to welcome the rape, which she calls "the feeding," which I guess is the tenuous vampire angle. All day she hears noises from one of the walls--is it another prisoner digging through, erroneously thinking our heroine's cell is the outside world? Eventually the fellow prisoner busts through--it is a robot in the shape of a woman! The rape robot rapes them both at the same time, and our narrator enjoys watching her fellow rape victim being used at the same time she is being used, reminding her of how her boyfriend used to enjoy watching porn.
Like "The Case of the Demon Lover," "Sustenance" is about a woman who was disappointed by real men and has come to find sexual satisfaction through having sex with a monster, satisfaction she would not have found on her own, but only after being taken by force.
This story is actually pretty good; Kilpatrick's depiction of the narrator's evolving psychology as she responds to developments in her sanity-busting situation and her descriptions of the smell of metal and of the expanding hole between the cells are effective. Of course, a story in which a woman comes to appreciate being raped--by a robot!--until her orifices bleed is not for everybody.
"Going Down"
This one debuted in
Mondo Zombie, alongside a new story by Robert Bloch which I will likely get around to reading some day, and has reappeared in other zombie anthologies, including in one featuring a story by George R. R. Martin. Kilpatrick hits the big time with this one!
"Going Down" is by far the most literary (i. e., most oblique, hardest to understand, and least plot-driven) of today's stories, and the most disgusting and depressing. There are also lots of jokes that are not funny.
Paddy is, I think, a small-time actress who, I guess, appeared in B-movies before the zombie apocalypse, and was sexually abused by her father and took lots of drugs for her psychological problems. Nowadays she is the sole living human in a world of animated corpses, and wishes she would turn into a zombie herself, but her efforts to commit suicide fail and the zombies of her father and her neighbors don't want to kill or eat her. She has hallucinations of Marilyn Monroe visiting her (dearest Marilyn masturbates with a Twinkie during one such visit.) The story ends when Paddy eats her father's rotting penis.
Thumbs down for this one. The big time is not what it is cracked up to be.
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All three of these stories are about men treating women badly, how men both fail to meet women's sexual needs and also treat women as sex objects to satisfy their own needs--ironically, the women in the stories are most satisfied when they are most exploited, most objectified. Is Kilpatrick suggesting that women's minds have been warped by our patriarchal society ("Going Down" in particular, but "The Case of the Demon Lover" as well, take aim at big institutions--the entertainment industry in the former and law enforcement in the latter--for misusing or abusing women) to the point that women are complicit in their own oppression? Or is Kilpatrick simply recognizing that women's biological makeup is such that they crave domination?
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Well, we did it; we read a story about a police officer raped by some kind of voodoo wizard (she enjoyed it) and a story about a woman raped by a robot (she enjoyed it) and a story abut a woman having an incestuous relationship with a zombie (I guess she enjoyed it?) Nancy Kilpatrick has a large body of work but I think a little bit of it goes a long way and you shouldn't expect to catch me reading any more of her oeuvre any time soon.
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