Welcome to the Naked Reader Book Club! The fabulous Sacchi Green will be our host this evening. Tonight we'll be discussing an eerily sexy anthology sure to keep us spellbound.

Red Velvet and Absinthe - Paranormal Erotic Romance
Edited by Mitzi Szereto

Explore Your Dark Desires

The supernatural: Think vampires, werewolves, ghosts…eerie sounds in the night, impassioned whispers teasing at the depths of sleep…Think red velvet, flickering candles, love and lust with otherworldly partners who unleash passion and desire far beyond that inspired by simple mortals. Editor Mitzi Szereto’s sensual stories provide thrills and chills of telltale hearts, redolent with romance and danger. Red Velvet and Absinthe will carry you away, conjuring up the romantic spirit of classic Gothic fiction with a generous dose of eroticism.
A lusty lady, ravaged, seeks comfort in the arms of her maidservent in Giselle Renarde’s rapacious “Milady’s Bath,” while bondage and desire enslave a wolf girl to her master in “Snowlight, Moonlight” by Rose de Fer. Janine Ashbless’s “Cover Him with Darkness” is an exquisite tale of secret love between an imprisoned fallen angel and the girl he seduces. Editor Mitzi Szereto’s vampire romance “The Blood Moon Kiss” is sexy Southern Gothic at its finest.

Whether you've read the book or not, everyone is welcome to join the Naked Reader Book Club discussion! If you have had a chance to read Red Velvet and Absinthe, feel free to drop in and give us your opinion on the story. less

Getting a head start to let you get your Goth on early (and to see whether I've got my log-in problems solved.) Here's the Foreward Kelley Armstrong wrote for Red Velvet and Absinthe, an historical overview of the Gothic genre that Mitzi's book so deliciously updates and intensifies. Tomorrow I'll post Mitzi's own introduction.

"The tradition of Gothic literature stretches back to the early days of the novel, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. Anyone who has read Poe or Stoker or Daphne du Maurier would recognize the early gothic elements in Walpole’s story. The story begins with a tragedy—a lord’s son dies on his wedding day. The lord then decides to marry the girl himself. She flees to a church. The lord pursues and is about to kill her rescuer when a birthmark reveals that the young man is his own son. The lord locks him in a tower, but he escapes with the girl into the catacombs. And so it continues, a melo- dramatic tale of murder, betrayal and mistaken identity, with a bittersweet romantic ending. By the third edition, the book’s subtitle had changed from “A Story” to “A Gothic Story.” And so a genre was launched.

Classic Gothic literature, with its stock elements—innocent heroine, mysterious hero, isolated setting, curses, madness, secrets—has gone in and out of fashion since Walpole. In the sixties and seventies, it saw a revival with Gothic romantic suspense, most notably in the books of Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels and Mary Stewart. These novels often included an element of the supernatural, but it was usually subdued. A ghost might hold the key to a secret or a character might discover her ancestors were witches. The erotic elements were even more subdued. Rarely was there anything more explicit than kisses and longing. Even the erotic subtext was muted, far more than it had been in Gothic novels written a century earlier.

In the late seventies, Gothic fiction began another turn, one that firmly embraced both the sensual and the supernatural. Leading this new era was Anne Rice, who returned to the early days of the genre, following in the footsteps of Bram Stoker and James Malcolm Rymer by putting vampires at the center of her work. Her sensual vampires were not the monsters, though, but the protagonists. Twenty-five years later, authors took Rice’s ideas even further, and the genre of paranormal romance was born, replete with sexy supernaturals of every variety, from vampires and werewolves to angels and demons. And these were not the chaste encounters seen in the Gothic romances of the sixties. These were erotic, often explicitly so, exploring every facet of sexuality from GLBT to poly relation- ships to S/M to fetish.

Red Velvet and Absinthe celebrates the Gothic in all its forms and adds in the erotic elements that were often glossed over in the genre’s early incarnations. Here we do find traditional histor- ical tales and exotic settings, but we’ll also find contemporary stories, and those with a magical surrealism that transcends time. The stock elements are well represented, too, often with an original twist, giving us delicious tales of family secrets and horrible curses, enchanted paintings and mysterious beverages.

Those looking for the supernatural will not be disappointed. Stories feature not only recognizable creatures, such as were-wolves and ghosts, but mysterious ones too, men whispered to be demons or golems, and new fantastical beasts born from the authors’ imaginations.

Whatever the setting or the time period or the elements chosen, all these stories embrace the emotional and sensory richness integral to the Gothic tale. We don’t just read words on a page. We feel the red velvet. We taste the absinthe. We smell the flower and sweat. We hear the whispers and cries. And we experience the thrilling danger, the looming apprehension, the exquisite passion. That is the core of Gothic literature and this collection delivers."

Kelley Armstrong less

Secret Santa? Hey, it just occurred to me that I've never seen a Santa vampire (or werewolf) story. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though. Hmm, were-reindeer? I do have a thing for antlers.

Are we ready to listen for the howl of the wind and the wolves tonight? less