Naughty Nooners

Title: Naughty Nooners Anthology
Author: Various
Publisher: Total E-Bound
Genre: M/M contemporary & Paranormal romance
Length: 245 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

A guest review by Jenre

Summary Review
A reasonably good anthology of well written but rather dull stories about two men who take time out for sex during the middle of the day.

THE REVIEW

I’m not putting the blurbs with this review because each of the six stories has a blurb of its own at the publisher, rather than a generic blurb for the anthology. Click on the book title to be taken to the publisher page where you can read the blurbs for yourself if you are interested.

I picked up this anthology for two reasons. Firstly I’d been looking at the recent releases at TEB and noticed a few of their short stories which I fancied reading. Then I saw they were all from the same anthology, Naughty Nooners, re-released as separate stories, so I thought I may as well get the whole anthology. Secondly, I was in the mood for something hot and steamy and these shorts seemed to fit the bill. Unfortunately for me the stories weren’t just the quick and nasty sexy tales I’d been anticipating, but longer stories made up of page after page of sex (often 3 or more scenes within the story) and after the 1st sex scene I began to lose interest as the rest of the sex in the story was often just the same old, same old. To compound the problem, many of the stories also contained one of my dislikes, insta-love. This meant that not only did I struggle through endless dull sex scenes, I got to the end of the stories only to find an implausible HEA tacked onto the end.

Obviously, the above is just my general feelings about the anthology as a whole. There were one or two stories which I enjoyed for the most part. My favourite story was Raven by Dakota Rebel, which told the story of two vampires who own a gay club. The two heroes have been ignoring their feelings for each other for while until the appearance of another man sets wheels in motion that brings them together. Whilst the vampire theme was interesting, what I liked more was the secondary character of Samson who was a mix of bravado and dominance which was at odds with his slight figure and twinky looks. In some ways I wanted to know more about him than I did the vampires and I wonder whether another story featuring him is on the cards.

Another story I liked was Lunch is Served by Jude Mason which features new guy at a BDSM club, Philip, whose job it was to keep an eye on the scenes, help out the Doms and generally act as eye candy/security in one of the dungeon rooms. Despite all the flesh on display, Philip is more interested in the club boss, Mark. The story wasn’t perhaps the most realistic I’ve read, but the sexual tension was nicely high and the sex itself some of the best written in the anthology. I also liked Philip’s mix of extreme embarrassment over his skimpy ‘uniform’ and trying to appear nonchalant.

Out of the other four stories, honourable mentions need to go to Dalton’s Awakening by Carol Lynne, which dealt sympathetically with a straight to gay theme, and Lust in the Afternoon by Cian Fey which put together an IT nerd with a porn site cameraman to great effect.

None of the stories in the anthology were badly written and yet there were parts of all the stories which dragged a little for me. I would have been happy to read stories centred around a hot noon encounter, but these stories tried to fit that within a longer narrative which didn’t always work. Still, if you like insta-love (or characters who realise they are in love through sex); like long drawn out sex scenes; and are willing to suspend your disbelief a little, then this book will be for you.