Sins of the Sirens: Fourteen Tales of Dark Desire
Featuring stories by: Loren Rhoads, Maria Alexander, Mehitobel Wilson, and Christa Faust
2008,
Dark Arts Books
Review by
Superheidi
Horror and erotica go together quite a bit in this genre (that being, “horror”) but sometimes erotica can miss out on one of the most important parts of what is sexy: desire. These stories are not about cold or nameless desire, poetry, or making the disgusting palatable. They’re about some very real people (most of them women) who crave love, flesh, and other less normal aspects of human sexuality. The authors of
Sins of the Sirens have gone out of their way to write stories that are not the usual fare in horrerotica. In fact, some of the stories hardly qualify as horror, being more like series of one-act dramas, albeit with a dark slant. Rarely does the supernatural rear its head, (it does in a few, like Rhoads’s
Last Born and
The Angel’s Lair)
Sins deals mostly with relatable characters and fetishes…
The authors selected for Sins are above-average in not only writing and status in the horror community, but in their ability to relate to one-another so well in an anthology.
Loren Rhoads’s stories, all from a female perspective, do have an extra element of the supernatural in them. As aforementioned, The Angel’s Lair is about sexual toying between an angel and a demon. Last Born, her longest, deals with the negative powers of dark voodoo and a witch’s desire to keep the soul of her unborn child pure. Sound of Impact and Still Life with Broken Glass are almost non-genre pieces. They both depict unstable relationships and a dangerous way of expressing love and sexual excitement.
Maria Alexander’s stories start of where Rhoads’s left off; with unchecked sexual fetishes that can become dangerously out of control. Of course, her story Pinned involves an evil boyfriend who likes to use his sexual partners for his own dark magical needs. The Dark River In His Flesh is a beautiful supernatural story that seems to stem from Poe or Keats’ lives. A man, obsessed with a dead lover who he discovers was unfaithful, literally seeks out his own death in the narrow streets of Victorian England. The Last Word, appropriately, is very simple and straightforward. A man starts receiving messages written to him in an old diary. And if the message should happen to start talking about killing people…. What then? Alexander’s stories are maybe the most engaging because they are the most commercial. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. She knows the different forms for each sub-genre of horror she attempts in Sins down to the details like only a true genre fiction fan can. She’s the only author in the book whose work seems to reflect a love of other writers, particularly Poe and even a hint of Grimm’s fairy tales.
Mehitobel Wilson’s four stories require more concentration; they are trickier, they include lines that can’t be missed or a piece of an intricate puzzle will be lost. They are terribly engrossing and devious, with characters you couldn’t possibly root for as they fall headlong into danger, yet we want to stand by and watch them squirm nonetheless. It’s also a set of stories that sometimes require your own interpretation and no clear-cut answer; like with the irreverent and strange The Wild, in which a woman discovers the truth about her sexual “itch” that she can never scratch. Close and Heavy Hands are morality tales about getting your “sexual” wishes, if you will (i.e., be careful what you ask for, you just might get it) and parting Jane is a truly sad, depressing, amazing little story told from the point of view of an abused girl being torn apart, literally, in order to save her diseased older sister.
Christa Faust, famously infamous for her noir-ish and crazy fiction, takes a chance with the definitely The Ring-inspired Love, La Llorona set in Mexico and involving a cursed movie on DVD and a vengeful ghost. It’s a little predictable, and has the sort of ending you’d expect from a sci-fi channel movie, but hey, who doesn’t love a sci-fi channel movie? Her epic Firebird is a sci-fi lesbian love quest for redemption and freedom from addiction that reminds us what we love so much about Faust’s writing in the first place. Tighter is a less traditional fetish story, but like all other fetish tales seems to remind us to be careful, because anything dangerous can end up being, well, dangerous if you’re not careful. Faust’s latter two stories don’t follow anyone else’s pattern but her own, which is refreshing and allows them to be slightly shocking in their originality.
So what does this anthology want us to know? Not that it is a horror-anthology; we have plenty of those. And not that it’s a book by women. (Though it most certainly is that). It’s a collection of stories about desire; desire for touch, for love, for ropes, for a lost person, for a lost child, for life… the list is virtually endless. It’s a collection about how desire can turn evil, and usually does if unchecked, but how it can also allow us to overcome great evil. Desire, in and of itself, is what pushes us to try strange new sex and interesting toys that can hurt us. It’s the danger that we desire more so than the thing itself. These four women have done a great job of exhibiting, through their art, engaging and fun stories of desire and its resultant pain and ecstasy while managing to express themselves in the bargain.
