THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 1997
edited by Susie Bright
The fifth installment of Bright's annual offers further evidence that there is some very inventive erotica being produced at the moment—along with a good deal of flat, rather formulaic (albeit exuberantly frank) work. Mark Stuertz's ``Lunch'' offers an ingenious, pungent variation on voyeurism; Marcy Sheiner's ``What?'' nicely catches the complex emotional issues (of honesty, of trust) that surround sex; M. Christian's ``How Coyote Stole the Sun'' offers an ingenious, and deeply weird, x-rated variation on the trickster figure of Coyote, mingling strangeness and sex. While the usual erotic archetypes figure in the collection (threesomes; demon lovers; exhaustively described S&M games), the tales only really come alive when they offer truly startling variations on the norm or when they give some space to developing a sense of character. An intermittently stimulating gathering.