Sex Scene: An Anthology, a Review by Ally Nicholl

Thirteen writers, each with different backgrounds and experiences, are given the simple brief : write a sex scene. This forms the intriguing premise of Sex Scene: An Anthology, edited by Robert James Russell, and the results are fascinating.

It gets off to a shaky start with ‘Tight’ by Dan Holloway, which has some good moments but is let down by clunky Nietzsche references and a plot twist which feels tacked-on and unconvincing. Things quickly pick up, however, with Remittance Girl’s mesmerising ‘Recursion’, a steamy scene viewed through the narrator’s voyeuristic gaze, and ‘Mr Necessary’ by Leah Peterson, in which a woman reeling from a break-up desperately needs a nameless stranger to fuck away the pain.

Some scenes are wryly amusing, such as ‘Charlie Says’ by Scott C Rogers, which concerns a couple who break into and have sex in empty houses and the boyfriend’s increasingly reluctant participation in the girlfriend’s sexual role-play games. ‘The Photograph’, by Jeff Pfaller, has elements of farce in the way the plot develops and I love some of the details, such as Bill’s description of his affair:

There were still lots of awkward pauses and logistical necessi­ties. The actual mechanics of the thing didn’t feel different. Stopping to take off my socks was still awkward. Changing positions usually resulted in somebody getting an elbow in the mouth or my cock bent in ways I didn’t know it could.

If most of the stories are having sex, ‘The Lake (The Lake and the Stars)’ by Sarah E. Melville is very much making love. Perhaps it is a bit too coy at times, but it is also a lyrical depiction of sex at its most tender and magical.

Cherise Wolas tells her sex scene ‘Chasing Joanna’ with a lovely rhythmic prose style, a sort of back-and-forth repetition which mimics the act itself:

She thinks of delivery, of being delivered, of delivering her children, of her children, of conceiving, of cocks, of this cock in her hand, of this man’s cock in her hand. In her hand is the cock of a man who is not her husband…

Then there’s the strange and rather wonderful ‘Flooring the Pouch of Douglas’ by Penny Goring. It’s essentially a collage of words and sentences the author took from novels and textbooks on her shelf, mixed and reconstructed to create an abstract story which interweaves poetic phrases and intricate anatomical descriptions to impressive effect.

‘Anna and Jake’, by Gary Percesepe, is overlong and full of leaden exchanges (‘Did you know that the male tarantula dies after mating?’ … ‘Well, that’s not what I was thinking about. But yeah, it’s common for male species to die after mating. You guys are too much for us’), but the sex is good and there is an interesting dynamic between the two characters, despite the familiar older-man-younger-student-setup. Anna is far from being a naive young girl, and displays greater confidence and sexual maturity than the relatively inexperienced and insecure Jake.

As Russell states in his introduction this is a collection of stories about sex rather than a collection of erotica. His own scene, ‘Eaten Alive’, starts innocuously enough but soon takes a more uneasy turn as it explores the darker recesses of sexual fantasy, allowing access to the sort of thoughts that a person would never normally admit, even to themselves. Kirsty Logan’s frank and delicately-written ‘Girls Can Tell’ focuses more on the moments between the sex and on the relationship between her two characters, which is fraught and complex. Sabina England’s ‘Islamic Orgasm’ is far from delicate but its guttural prose works well within the context of the story. I found it a difficult one to love, but it is admirable for its unflinching study of sexual attitudes and religious hypocrisy.

In the final scene, ‘In A Christian Country’ by Sara Lippmann, a woman fucks the exterminator in the suffocating heat of the American deep south, surrounded by flies and the stench of death and bug spray. The gruesome imagery is beautifully evoked, and the anthology ends on a troubling but memorable note.

And so I emerged, spent and exhausted but largely satisfied. Allowing the writers the freedom to approach the subject however they chose has produced a fascinating range of stories, from the humorous and light-hearted to the sensual, the uncomfortable and the downright sinister. There is eroticism but also an exploration of sex in its many facets, and the result is a superior anthology that I highly recommend.

Sex Scene is available as a free e-book.

Follow Ally Nicholl on Twitter @coulterscandy.