Product Description

Between dusk and dark lies another world.

The playful quartet that penned the acclaimed Once Upon A Dyke are dimming the lights for journeys into worlds of breathless seduction.

Haunted castles and lost ingénues, shadows hungry for life, immortal beings of power claiming their captive souls--everything is possible when the sun goes down.

Curl up for seductive, skin-tingling novellas, perfect for bed time. Don't worry--the flutter at the window is only the curtain in the breeze...

Barbara Johnson, Karin Kallmaker, Therese Szymanski and Julia Watts join forces again for the third in their critically-acclaimed New Exploits series, creating unique stories with lesbian erotica, humor and adventure. The result is what Curve Magazine called "a true rarity."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #402389 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

From the Inside Flap
She seemed so far away and yet she was right there. Her dark hair was ruffled and then I met her gaze.

The red light was coming from her eyes.

I tried to scream, but there was no sound in me. Her mouth opened over my spread legs and her white teeth seemed to drip red.

"First," she finally continued, "there's the devouring."

--Castle Wrath, Karin Kallmaker

The woman moaned. Nadia held her tight, kissing her deeply on the mouth, then letting her tongue glide down over her collarbone and down to the hot indentation between her breasts. If she had the time, she would make love to the woman first, but she was so hungry. It had been days since she'd feasted.

--Running with Stone Ponies, Barbara Johnson

She kissed me hard, biting down on my lower lip til she drew blood. She licked my lips and let out a low, rumbling sound like a purring cat. I was excited, but I was also scared. If it had been Driver's Ed instead of sex, she would have been shoving me out onto the interstate when I had only just learned how to circle an empty parking lot. "Sweet," she whispered," licking her own lips, then leaning down to kiss my neck.

--We Recruit, Julia Watts

She played her tongue lightly over my earlobe, down my neck, and then sucked at my neck. She ran her hands under my T-shirt, feeling my skin, making me squirm. "I wonder, sometimes, if she brings me here just so I might find you. God, Rebecca, I want you so badly--"

I pushed her back, sure of one thing as I seemed to straddle vast gulfs in time. "I'm Rhenné."

--Elsewhen, Therese Szymanski

Excerpted from Stake Through the Heart: New Exploits of Twilight Lesbians by Karin Kallmaker, Therese Szymanski, Julia Watts, Barbara Johnson. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
(The opening of Castle Wrath, the first novella)

The important thing is that you believe what I'm telling you because, frankly, it's unbelievable from the get go. It's not like it's a long story, or anything, and I still don't know how it ends, but it's completely and totally true.

I took this writing class and they said the important thing was to write what you know and leave out the boring bits. That's two important things, I realize that now, but here's what I know and I'm leaving out the boring part about how it all came to pass: I inherited a castle in Scotland!

You don't want to know about my grandfather's great aunt's adopted son's nephew-by-marriage who died without issue and the long series of accidents that lead to me being the heir--trust me, it's a forty-part episode of Masterpiece Theater. But here I am on a train in the Scottish countryside, trying to imagine the fate that caused all those deaths that let this incredible thing happen to me. It's a bit freaky thinking about karma and fate and payback so I'm not thinking about it.

What I'm thinking about right now is that I can't understand a thing anyone says and I'm hungry. Plus, there's this tall, dark woman who keeps staring at me. I think I saw her at the train station in Glasgow. I had to run for the train and she seemed to be following me because she was running too. She's attractive but hardly my type--too old. Too serious, I'll bet. I trod on her foot when the train started to go and she said "buggery bollocks" and I said I was sorry so I don't know why she's staring at me.

I wonder if she's the other heir.

Sorry, I hadn't gotten to that part. I didn't mean to leave it out as it's not at all boring. See, there are two heirs. We have to live in the castle for thirty nights and then one of us will inherit and the other gets a ticket home.

Customer Reviews

Disappointed
I hate to say this, because I really like the authors in this anthology and I love the vampire genre, but I was really disappointed by the stories in this collection. Maybe my expectations were too high given the above.

Castle Wrath by Karin Kallmaker started off really promising. I was chuckling out loud as the character narrated the start of her adventure and I was really enjoying the humorous writing in a style Ms. Kallmaker doesn't normally use. But I dunno, somewhere things shifted and it almost became an entirely different style of story. I think it either should have started differently to fit the later portion, or the initial tone should have been maintained throughout. In the end, aside from that, the story itself just didn't interest me at all. The idea of inheriting a castle in a vampire story had the potential to go in all sorts of wonderful directions, but the direction that Ms. Kallmaker chose wasn't where I wanted to go. By the end I just wasn't interested in what happened to the characters.

Running with Stone Ponies was another story with a lot of potential, but I feel it fell really flat. This time mostly due to what came across to me as amateurish writing. Which I suppose takes a lot of gall for me to say, since my attempts at writing are quite pathetic, but there it is all the same. I felt the relationship between the two main characters developed ridiculously. More that there wasn't really any development at all, it was just suddenly there. At various points while reading I was actually cringing at parts of the plot, or specific phrasing choices. If I'm cringing at the writing, I'm not being swept away into the fantasy.

Elsewhen by Therese Syzmanski was a solid story and one that I did enjoy. But the writing at times was disjointed in a way difficult for me to describe. I felt like characters were all over the place at various points in what they were thinking or feeling, making it difficult for me to follow along as well as I should. That's not to say that characters shouldn't be muddled or confused about what they think, but it needs to be written in a way so that as a reader I'm empathetic, not irritated and taken out of the story.

We Recruit by Julia Watts was okay. I can't really think of anything negative to say about it. It just didn't really grab me either, at least not the latter part. Maybe because they wimped out as vampires. Heh. While being a vastly morally superior stance to take, drinking bottled blood just ain't sexy!

I gave the anthology 3 stars. To me that means it's average, and if you're strongly interested, probably still worth buying and reading. I didn't feel it was a total waste of my time. But I'm still left with that disappointing feeling of being disappointed by an anthology that I had been anticipating with a great deal of excitment. (For context, I own almost all the published novels and anthologies by Karin Kallmaker, Therese Syzmanski, and Julia Watts, so normally I really am a fan!)

Another Good theme collection
It's surprising that Bella After Dark has come up with three successive good collections of themed novellas using only four authors. In each of the collections, I have had a favorite story. In the first one Karin Kallmaker's re-telling of the Little Mermaid was my favorite; she also topped the list in BELL BOOK AND DYKE. In this collection, Barbara Johnson out did herself. I was afraid that the stories would be unable to find new territory to explore, but Johnson's pre and post atomic disaster tale did it for me. I hope these women can come up with yet another theme and do as well with it.