Dark Matter by Michael Perkins

I've got a great excerpt of Michael Perkins' new release Dark Matter here for you today. Read on!

...

Lightening, meet Thunder...



San Francisco is a place of pure excess and liberation, where every flavour of sexuality is there for the tasting. Robin wants to be part of it, and by embracing extreme erotic experiences to escape her father's hypocrisy. Buddy is a rebel, a wild spirit. The moment they meet, sparks fly in a frenzy of desire unbound and darkness unleashed; and when Robin asks Buddy to kill her father, he knows he has found his destiny.



Dark Matter is a hypnotic tale of erotic cravings.

Available from:


Amazon

Amazon UK

All Romance

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

*****

Excerpt:
The Spiral Dance

Gods, from your rocky home in the highest snow-capped Sierras of the imagination, swoop down now on San Francisco, the City of Perpetual Indulgence.

Blot out all other sounds from your hearing and attend to the dark passage of one in your indifferent keeping — one touched by you, and like you,possessed....

Yet another turn of the wheel, another rotation of the earth: darkness is cast like a spell. A night without fog.

Straddling her snorting, fire-breathing Harley, Robin Flood roars up the steep undulating streets that slant to the sky and then down them to the Bay. She cuts a loud eructative path through the Marina and rumbles into stern Fort Mason, a former military facility converted into a cultural centre with shops, museums and a famous restaurant.

A bleached full moon leers down at her, one roguish lunar eyebrow cocked; clouds of galaxies extend from it into forever. The dark matter that makes up the unseen universe holds the stars apart. The Gods pay casual attention.

It is the beginning of November, final year of the century, on the night of the Spiral Dance — a Saturday night that falls on Samhain, when the dead pierce the veil that hangs between breathing and not, children who will never die (at least not in the twentieth, accursed century) eat sugar skulls, and a thousand boisterous pagans gather to celebrate the disappeared.

Robin joins the crowd cloaked in the exclusionary circle she draws around herself with strangers. She does not know anyone in the laughing, gesticulating, highspirited gathering of animals with horns, birds of prey, devils of all designs, medieval jongleurs, Green Men, maenads and vampires. Here, New Agers rub shoulders with Dark Agers. Here, imagination expresses the divine with profligate abandon.

Robin regrets momentarily that she has not worn a costume, but her eyes attract more attention than a mask would: they are an unfathomable cerulean, like the sea. Her glance when unguarded can be frightening in what it reveals of the cold wildness inside. Her features are small and finely chiselled, her mouth wide and lush. Her hair is cropped like glossy black feathers. One seashell ear is studded with five expensive earrings, the kind ear-nibblers cut their lips on. She’s prettier than the Queen of Heaven tonight, but there is something indistinct, unformed, indefinable but dangerous about her, as if she might be willing to do anything.

Hidden behind their masks, people stare at her. Aware of the impression she makes, she tucks her ambient rage in a pocket of her black motorcycle jacket and grins like an ingenue on crack. She waits patiently in the line, examining everyone for signs of the roles they might play in the drama of her life. She has a hunger to find out who she is, and she can only learn this from others; she is unknown to herself. Tonight her whim is that she is a temple prostitute come to worship the Goddess, weep for her dead, and party down with the pagans. Her fantasies are usually realised.

The motley line snakes around the pier to Herbst Pavilion, a giant former troop embarkation shed surrounded by choppy Bay waters. The huge space is sombre and magnificent, a maritime cathedral filled with the anxious ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of apprehensive young men who passed through the building on their way to war, and the unhappy spirits of those who never sailed home. It is an appropriate place to celebrate Halloween.

*****

About the Author:

MICHAEL PERKINS is the author of six collections of poetry. The Secret Record, literary criticism, was published by William Morrow in 1976. The Good Parts, selected book reviews, appeared in 1994. Among his other works of fiction and non-fiction are the novels Evil Companions, Dark Matter and Burn. His poems and essays have apeared in The Village Voice, Younger Critics of North America, The Nation,Mother Jones, Paper, Notre Dame Review, Exquisite Corpse, Big Bridge, Talisman, Rain Taxi andAmerican Book Review. He was the Leydig Trust's Writer of the Year in Great Britain in 2002, the recipient of the 2007 Obelisk Award for Lifetime Achievement and the 1957 Dunbar Poetry Prize. Carpe Diem, New and Selected Poems, appeared in 2011.

*****

Other Modern Erotic Classics available:

The Houdini Girl by Martyn Bedford
Lie to Me by Tamara Faith Berger
The Phallus of Osiris by Valentina Cilescu
Kiss of Death by Valentina Cilescu
The Flesh Constrained by Cleo Cordell
The Flesh Endures by Cleo Cordell
Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
The Tides of Lust by Samuel R. Delany
Sad Sister by Florence Dugas
The Ties That Bind by Vanessa Duriés
Dark Ride by Kent Harrington
3 by Julie Hilden
Neptune & Surf by Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Violent Silence by Paul Mayersberg
Homme Fatale by Paul Mayersberg
The Agency by David Meltzer
Burn by Michael Perkins
Dark Matter by Michael Perkins
Evil Companions by Michael Perkins
Beautiful Losers by Remittance Girl
Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald

Music Mondays: "Thing Called Love" by Bonnie Raitt

"I ain't no porcupine -- take off your kid gloves."



When I was younger, Dennis Quaid completely mesmerized me in this video. The way he grins at her made me feel things I didn't yet understand... I also love how, even though the two never touch, the video makes it feel like they will be getting together once the song is over.

On Why It's Hard to Draw a Line Between Porn and Erotica

Periodically, I post thoughts on the porn/erotica distinction. This is one of the best ones I've found, again from Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors:

Most lines drawn between morally-acceptable expressions of sex (including literary erotica) and bad, perverse, unhealthy expressions of sex (including "porn") are scary because the vehemence of the line-drawers is only matched by the arbitrariness of the line.

This is from an essay called "Drawing the Line."

Being Defined by the Past

Another snip from Jean Roberta's excellent Sex Is All Metaphors:

I wonder why sex is usually treated as an exceptional activity which must be judged differently from every other kind. Most people acquire job histories over time as well as sexual track records, yet few middle-aged brain surgeons are permanently stigmatized for having flipped burgers in a part- time job as pre-med students. No one wants to be defined for all time as they were in the past.

This quote is from an essay called, "Retro-Shame, or the Persistence of the Past." I don't have much to add, except that I really like this point.

Going Down Out Loud

Going Down: Oral Sex Stories, which includes my piece, "Getting Something Out of It," is now out in an audiobook edition! I recently wrote about how much I was digging listening to erotica in audio form, so it's fun to see my work appear that way.

If you aren't entirely satisfied after Going Down (and who would be?), here are some other anthologies that include my work that have been performed out loud:

Passion: Erotic Romance for Women

Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies

Lesbian Cops: Erotic Investigations

The Most Fun Suggestion I've Heard for Cooking Up a New Story

Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors includes a great essay called "The Fickle Muse," about how to cook up new ideas when nothing seem fresh. Advice about writer's block abounds, but I really like the physicality of Roberta's discussion of it:

Focusing on each part of your body in turn, from feet to head or vice versa, is the best way I know of to reawaken the Muse. And despite what prudish authority figures have told you about the animal stupidity of human flesh, physical feelings are rarely crude or simple. (For that matter, even animals have their own wisdom, as pet- owners know.)

Just for the moment, data on which genres are still selling well in a troubled publishing market have no relevance. Feet, arms, tummy and all the other parts connected to them don't care about the market. Neither do they care about deadlines, guidelines, negative reviews, wars in the blogosphere, or grammatical issues. There is a place for all those things, but they don't belong in a quiet room prepared for the Muse.

I don't really believe in writer's block as its own special thing, but I know slumps occur in people's lives and jam them up in various ways for various reasons. Roberta's advice seems like it would be good in any such case, and the full version of the essay gets a little more sensual in its description of how the body can be listened to.

Why Sex Writing Shouldn't Always Be Nice

I recently started reading Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors, and came across a great passage on the issue of "sex-positive" writing. As she explains, many editors ask that erotica be sex-positive, which generally means avoiding a certain standard list of squicks (including things like very extreme violence). Sometimes, the sense of "sex-positive" is extended to mean a general attitude about sex within the story -- that it should be empowering, pleasurable, and so forth.

I like to write and read sex-positive stories, certainly. I have a story for another time about how sex-positive erotica is actually what made me understand feminism and become willing to call myself a feminist.

However, not all of my writing and reading is sex-positive, and there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. Roberta gives a nice account of why sex writing needs a range that includes the very unpleasant:

If sex is all metaphors, it can't always be a simple way to get happy. Sex can be a desperate, doomed attempt to bridge a gap in credibility or understanding. It can be an extreme form of exploitation. It can be the event that turns a high school girl who is desperate to fit in into a target for contempt from everyone she knows. It can be an attempt to prove something improvable. Sex can be an act of self-hatred, or hatred of the other. It can be the means by which invading armies literally colonize the bodies of civilians, hoping to impregnate as many "enemy women" as possible. Sex, broadly defined, can destroy both body and soul.

Should erotic writers avoid saying anything disturbing about sex? The terms "adult" and "mature" are often used as euphemisms for sexual content, yet to avoid mentioning any negative emotions (guilt, hatred, rage, fear, despair, regret, etc.) in connection with sex is to limit oneself to a fairly childish view of the world.

I started writing erotica because it's the genre where I feel most honest as a writer. It's the subject on which I really have something to say. And I'd definitely be lying if I pretended all my experience with sex has been pleasant or positive. Sometimes, I feel strange about the range of my work. I worry that some of my dark work for Forbidden Fiction, for example, would freak out readers who enjoyed, say, my light piece in the Cleis erotic romance anthology, Passion. I also worry that readers who like the dark stuff will find my happy endings fluffy. But I need that full range to say all of what I have to say about sex, and I try not to censor myself in either direction.