Best Bondage Erotica of the Year

January 18, 2021
Bussel (editor, the Best Women’s Erotica of the Year series) sets hearts racing with this anthology of 19 expertly selected BDSM stories. There’s enough variety among these red-hot tales to please any erotica fan, from the role-playing threesome in Veronique Veritas’s “Escape” and the pantyhose fetish featured in Trystan Kent’s “The Lash of a Thousand Wolfords,” to more intense kink, like knife play in Rebecca E. Blanton’s “Day 730” and age play in Evan Mora’s “Headspace.” Standouts include Posy Churchgate’s “Dark Dreams,” in which a newbie to kink is tutored online by a popular BDSM writer; Dr. J’s “A Constructed Threesome,” about a polyamorous couple celebrating their anniversary with bondage at a construction site; Elna Holst’s “Leather-Bound,” featuring a gay bibliophile celebrating her 40th birthday with sex in a library; Page Chase’s “Back in the Saddle,” which sees an athlete recovering from a bike crash in a decidedly unusual fashion; and Sonja E. DeWitt’s “Ballad of Desire and Saccharine Melodies,” about a musician whose piano performance gets a sexy edge from an unexpected source. Readers are sure to feel the heat.

February 10, 2020
Bussel (editor, Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volumes 1-5) arranges a celebration of bondage in all its forms in this wide-ranging, inclusive anthology. The work is bookended by a pair of standout tales: Ria Restrepo’s “Chained” welcomes readers with a charming protagonist exploring her fantasies for the first time, and Tiffany Reisz’s “The Beguiling of Merlin: An Erotic Fantasia” leaves a lasting impression with its sexy, creative premise. The 18 stories in between are admirably eclectic but uneven. Lazuli Jones offers unexpected sweetness in a futuristic sex club in “Connection,” while Angora Shade’s “Protocol” uses its spaceship setting for zero-gravity sexcapades between unconvincing characters. Many of the authors attempt to weave education about kink into their tales in ways that run from seamless to intrusive. Bussel is the worst offender, with the narrator of her “Necessary Roughness” spending more time explaining the pleasures of his marriage than actually experiencing them. Luckily, the breadth of tone and trope is wide enough that the weaker entries cannot mar the whole. With characters of all ages, genders, and sexualities represented, the diversity of this anthology ensures that any reader with even a glancing interest in bondage will find something that piques.