And in the middle of my terrible mood, I discovered that Forget the Sleepless Shores has made one reviewer's shortlist of the best erotica of 2018:
Not erotica per se, yet this ravishing collection of literary stories should be on the to-read list of every erotic writer who claims to care about the beauty of language and the compelling allure of style. Taaffe's stories are seldom "short" in the strictly commercial understanding of the term, they take their time to be told with however many words may be required, and some of them are quite long indeed. The language is not overly dense or difficult, the narrative seldom inaccessible or overly obscure, and yet, the writing is so dazzlingly fecund, so spendthrift in its vivid, varicolored descriptions, that the reader is immersed in wonder, engulfed like a drowning soul in a state of helpless bliss. Images of water and the supernatural permeate all these stories, forming loose relationships, a kind of magnetic coherency or some form of sub-molecular bonding. Water in all its ineffable forms, life-giving or lethal, calm or chaotic, rain, tears, tides, lakes, rivers, oceans, sea brine, blood, sexual fluid . . . Love-sick demons, the ghosts of the drowned, vampires, mer-folk, muses bearing gifts of madness and otherworldly inspiration. Wondrous! Rarefied! Ineffably gorgeous! Read it and weep with joy!
Frankly, I'm delighted. I wasn't expecting that.
Not erotica per se, yet this ravishing collection of literary stories should be on the to-read list of every erotic writer who claims to care about the beauty of language and the compelling allure of style. Taaffe's stories are seldom "short" in the strictly commercial understanding of the term, they take their time to be told with however many words may be required, and some of them are quite long indeed. The language is not overly dense or difficult, the narrative seldom inaccessible or overly obscure, and yet, the writing is so dazzlingly fecund, so spendthrift in its vivid, varicolored descriptions, that the reader is immersed in wonder, engulfed like a drowning soul in a state of helpless bliss. Images of water and the supernatural permeate all these stories, forming loose relationships, a kind of magnetic coherency or some form of sub-molecular bonding. Water in all its ineffable forms, life-giving or lethal, calm or chaotic, rain, tears, tides, lakes, rivers, oceans, sea brine, blood, sexual fluid . . . Love-sick demons, the ghosts of the drowned, vampires, mer-folk, muses bearing gifts of madness and otherworldly inspiration. Wondrous! Rarefied! Ineffably gorgeous! Read it and weep with joy!
Frankly, I'm delighted. I wasn't expecting that.
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