Title: The House

Author: Cassie Alexander

Version: eBook (free)

Genre: Erotic Fiction/ Erotica

Synopsis:  The House is a place where all of your desires can be realized -- all you have to do is open the door.

Will you unlock the room with two men waiting to serve you? Or the one with dom inside? Which mask will you choose to wear to the ball? Who will you be for the night – and how many people will you sleep with along the way?

The House is a sexually explicit erotic adventure novel that lets you choose your path. It includes intense scenes of BDSM, bondage, spanking, MMF, FFF, orgies, etc.

The House has a door for everyone inside -- especially you.


This is the first in the Tales from the House Series. (From GoodReads)

Thoughts: Okay, I heard about this author before through Urban Fantasy, though I haven't gotten a chance to read any of her books. I have to admit. I was a little surprised to find her in the Erotica section. But this was actually quite good. Very good. It does live up to its synopsis I would say. It kind of is one continuous sex scene after another. So, if you're looking for something with a little more than that then I'd kind of suggest not going after this one. But that's a personal opinion. The "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" thing worked a lot more than I thought it would. The story was still able to flow and move. I did feel every so often I may be missing something. Or what the "other decision" result was. I didn't really find anything else with it I didn't like. Again, surprisingly, the second person perspective worked a lot more than I thought it would. Again, glad I picked this up.

So, a rant/post/discussion came up on The Saucy Wenches Book Club talking about the format and cliche's that a lot of the erotica novels follow nowadays. One of the rant points, I guess that's the best way to describe it, was that the 98-99% of the time the heroine of the story is a virgin. And me, personally, I have no issue with the heroine being a virgin. I have more issue how her virginity is actually treated. A lot of the times when, from what I've seen, when the heroine is  a virgin, her virginity either treated as a prize or some way to make her "special" or more important to the hero (because, y'know, it's not like she has a personality or deserves to be loved it for it; it's the amount of people she has or hasn't slept with that makes her really worth it). The state of her virginity is also used to distinguish her away from other women in the story typically, i.e. the woman who also wants the hero and who the heroine has to "fight" in order to keep him.

To go further, the heroine is painted as pure, "light", good, etc., her virginity or sexual experience being major part of this and her personality making up the last, small amount. The "competition", on the other hand, is the complete opposite--she's not a virgin, enjoys sex, knows what she likes, she's "evil". This can also come into play in Interracial Romance Novels if the "bad" character being racist is added to her personality. 

And when the heroine does finally lose her virginity, more than likely, to the hero, it's the most magnificent experience she's ever had--not because she's with a partner that she loves/trusts/want to sleep with, but because the hero is just that good. Now, I wouldn't want to dismiss the idea of having a great or enjoyable "first time", but it's the fact that it's told as if the heroine wouldn't be able to be pleased by any other man but the hero that irritates me. But that's expanded upon better in the original article (linked below).  

But yeah, that's how I feel about that. 

Source (My Tumblr) (Note: This version is much shorter than here. LOL)

Original Post (The Saucy Wenches Book Club)

Reading "Fic" feels a lot like trudging through the ravings all about Sherlock fandom (it's all good though, but I haven't made much progress). Meanwhile, I wanted to trace some more similarities between slash and romance, and to just learn more about the critique of romance novels, so I went to the Library for Foreign Literature here, in Moscow. They've got a pretty impressive catalogue of literature on feminism, popular culture and semiotics, all the stuff that I need. I found a bunch of books that seemed relevant, but today I stopped at four, and even of those I've only really got through "Warrior Lovers" (which is about 97 pages, hah), but I worked the night shift yesterday, so I was in a sort of state where you're just lucky your eyes can stay open. 

Anyway, I totally didn't expect it, but with "Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality" I sort of hit the spot. It's a very short book that's basically trying to see if there's something wrong with slashers, and comes to the conclusion that all is well - it's just that slashers are subversive motherfuckers, in a nutshell. Well, not really, but it's in there. Honestly, though, despite the first half of the book being all about Darwinian theories and evolutionary psychology, eventually they come to the juicy topic of male pr0n vs. female romance novels, and to slash, and it's pretty good. They draw very nice comparisons between romance novels and slash fiction, while also getting the general ideas about slash idiosyncrasities across. (I'll add some quotes later.) 

One thing is apparent though: the book feels pretty outdated. Even though it's been published in 2003, it still tackles K/S mostly, or Starsky and Hutch. I mean. I think, the fandom in general has evolved immensly (and, perhaps, simultenuously devolved in some respects). Maybe in this age writing books about fandom, or aspects of fandom is not a very good idea, because everything changes too fast - maybe online journals and blogs are a better medium to reflect on fandom culture. (Of course you still need time to gather your thoughts, so to speak, do some recearch, get some quotes etc., but The Daily Dot is doing a terrific job, imo.)

I'm not so sure about anything I've written here, because I'm still in this state, that's basically all your life-support system on the verge of saying 'goodbye'. So, before my brain totally shuts down: other books I skimmed today were "Reading the Romance: Women, Patricarchy, and Popular Literature" by Janice A. Radway (which does seem very promising; it's probably a classic work?), "Adventure, mystery, and romance: formula stories as art and popular culture" by John G. Cawelti (which is a great book on formulas in stories, but wasn't relevant to my research due to its focus on crime/detective stories; but it's pretty great) and "Language and desire: Encoding sex, romance and intimacy". The last one is a sort of a collective work on semiotics of language of love and desire, and it is massively intriguing, but-- I'm just to tired to form a coherent thought at this point. 

So, it was nice to find the book exactly on the subject that I'm interested in, plus I love LIBFL now.