There are many ways of exerting control, and the best ones are those that really don't seem to demand any effort. Not on the part of the controller, at least.

That's the first lesson you learn from Kristina Lloyd's "No Sleep," as the narrator kneels awaiting her master's pleasure, watching his naked body silhouetted against the TV screen in a cheap hotel that she booked by the hour - and all he seems to care about is locating the remote control. Until the moment when he affects to notice her, then lackadaisically turns to write "free whore" on her chest.

Or from Kristina Wright's "Brush Strokes" which astonishes with the inventive uses to which a paintbrush dipped in water can be put. Here the narrator cannot speak her wishes. But she can daub them on paper in water that dries almost before each word is complete, and though her partner is the dominant here, it's her submission that calls the shots.

It's intriguing, just how many Ds situations hinge not on the dominant taking charge of the situation, but on the submissive taking command of the dom. Not because that is itself a unique situation, but because so many stories that venture into this field automatically assume that the dominant dominates. The nineteen stories that comprise this collection seem carefully selected to blur that boundary; to open doors that cliche and convention like to close, so that when a "traditional" relationship surfaces, it is among the least traditional of them all. Dominic Santi's "Crossing The Line," with its sissy boy hero finding himself an honest-to-goodness disciplinary wife, is arousing even if it doesn't tap the reader's usual arousal points, while Janine Ashbless's "Being His Bitch" takes us into the heart of a human pet show, with the bright and the beautiful cavorting in their animalistic finery, and ownership conferred through devotion, not demand.

Andrea Dale's "A Few Things To Pick Up On Your Way Home," meanwhile, will not have done its job unless you turn straight from its pages to the Eden Fantasys search button, and seek out any toys that your own collection is missing... what you do with them after that, of course, is your own business. But Bound By Lust is one of those books where almost every page bristles with an alluring new idea, and talking of bristles, that new hairbrush I bought looks like it could untangle a few unexpected knots as well.

I love it when a book gives me hot new ideas!