I was surprised by "Best Fetish Erotica" in a few ways. First, the quality of the writing was consistently good. Usually anthologies are a bit hit-or-miss, leading me to wonder if the editor simply didn't have enough quality submissions to choose from. This is not the case with "Best Fetish Erotica". The writing was uniformly engaging and well-wrought.

The second surprise was while all the stories take some aspect of fetish eroticism as their subject, a number seem more like personal memoirs than short stories for someone to jerk off to. For example, Susie Bright's contribution, "Selfish Fetish", reads less like an erotic story, and more like a cathartic accounting of the author being sexually molested at Disneyland by a fur-suited Disney chipmunk. For my masturbatory purposes, it didn't work.

Ditto Monah Li's "Catholic Spanking" (sounds promising, right?)--it was less about the fantasy of corporal punishment by sexy nuns, and more about the reality of being molested by religious fanatics. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a juicy erotic story with non-consensual, blasphemous, or inter-generational themes. The difference for me is in how the piece is executed-- done one way, it makes me want to touch myself; done another, I feel outrage at what may be a person's sad history.

Happily, the majority of the stories in the book were obvious fiction. Some were very fine indeed. For example, I found "Machine" by Raven Kaldera, to be very erotic. Exploring the idea that a submissive can be a submissive machine (rather than a human slave), Machine's adventures in the conference center and the police station had my hand and my vibrator between my thighs for the duration.

A third feature I didn't expect in the anthology was humor. "Office Hours", "Santa's Little Helper", "The Vegetarian" and "Girdle Boy" all have humor interwoven with the erotic content. "Office Hours", "Santa's Little Helper" were both even-blended mixtures of humor and eroticism. "The Vegetarian" and "Girdle Boy" were more stronger weighted in favor of humor.

As in all my reviews of fiction, a caveat: for me the whole point of reading erotica is as a supplement to the fantasies in my head while I am jerking off. Any review I write is from that perspective, what Pat Califia calls "the wet test." This book passes!