I know what you're thinking - tentacle porn. Tentacle porn that would put the manga and anime people to shame. Tentacles everywhere, filling every orifice. That's the image we come up with when someone suggests combining the world of Lovecraft and erotica. Don't be ashamed, I thoughts so as well. So much so, that I went into reading Cthulhurotica with a chuckle. Carrie Cuinn, the editor, pulled a fast one over us lovers of Lovecraft. We suckers will buy just about anything with Cthulhu plastered on it, right? Of course, we'd be wrong.

Combining the monstrous science fiction horror of Lovecraft with the literary erotic word must've been a hard task for the writers featured in the collection. The stories range from creepy to cute to downright arousing, touching on all ranges of attraction. Some writers dip into the bisexual landscape while others are a tad more conservative. In "Transfigured Night," K.V. Taylor spills out a homoerotic tale that skirts on necrophilia. Whereas, in "Le Ciél Ouvert," Kirsten Brown introduces us to a character whose sexual appetite can only be sated by something otherworldly. "The C-Word" by Don Pizarro, a May-December romance is reignited in the town of Innsmouth, showing that love has no age boundaries, as well as, cursed ones.

The collection is well worth the read for lovers of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as, those who simply just love. The collection also includes three essays, beautifully drawn images, and a few lines of Lovecraft's poetry. ( )

Some of the stories were enjoyable, but most of hem were fairly forgettable. Disappointing, overall. ( )

This sounded so sexy and weird. I like a little variety in erotica - twists and fantasy and elements of the bizarre. And I suppose these stories had some of that. But they were poorly written and executed, and most of them ended quite abruptly, sometimes just as they were getting interesting. And the sex itself wasn't that good. Many stories only hinted at it. When I got to one story about halfway through the book, the writing was so bad and the premise so thin and confusing that I had to put it down. Disappointing.

I read this for the Vaginal Fantasy Hangout book club, so I'll give it a review. I didn't absolutely HATE this book, but I didn't like it either. The majority of the stories in it ended very abruptly, some of them seemingly in the middle of the tale. While a lot of them were well-written, some of the stories didn't seem to make a lot of sense. Maybe because I'm new to the Cthulhu genre, but these stories we're not all that entertaining to me. Not something I'd read again. ( )

This collection of Yog-Sothothery has some stories with the sort of explicit sex the title might suggest, but in others, the authors simply offer stories of the "Mythos" where sex is not thoroughly ignored (in contrast to Lovecraft's originals)! The vein most represented here is the Deep Ones lore of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (in stories such as "The C-Word," "Transfigured Night," "The Fishwives of Sean Brolly," and "The Assistant from Innsmouth"), although of course stories inspired by "The Dunwich Horror" are not in short supply either, and there is a considerable variety overall. The one jauniste tale ("Flash Frame") was unsurprisingly one of my favorites, but there were a lot of good stories throughout.

Short fiction is not the entirety of the contents, though. There are black-and-white drawings illustrating many of the stories, mostly by artist Galen Dara, who shows some real versatility as well. There also three pieces of criticism at the end of the book, each of which has its merits. The first of them addresses the proliferation of Yog-Sothothery generally, the second anatomizes the erotic potentials of the Lovecraftian weird, and the third applies scholarly tools of genre and trope criticism to the actual fiction in the book. Also there are a couple of poems: Lovecraft's "Astrophobos" is excerpted at the start and finish of the story collection, and the anonymous "Victim of Victims" is a filking of "Fiddler on the Roof" which really isn't worthy of the rest of the volume.