I can’t remember the first time I saw a “choose your own adventure” erotic book because it was over ten years ago, sometime when I worked at Good Vibrations as the book review writer. They started coming out long before I saw one, in the 1990s, after the original, non-erotic iteration of the genre had been planted in kids’ fiction for over a decade. The adult version of this kind of book is always simultaneously a really great and really bad idea. Often, the execution suffers from genre-rot, or it’s too tame for actual adult readers.
There have been a couple of good ones, though. I found this short list of choose-your-own adventure erotic books, and it includes two books to consider if you’re interested in checking out the genre. However, it seems to me that choose-your-own books are designed primarily for physical books, so be warned that I don’t know how the form factor works with Kindle.
These two have interesting stories, they are well-written, and they are most certainly sexually explicit:
- Kathryn in the City: Create Your Own Erotic Fantasy by Mary Anne Mohanraj
- The Classics Professor: Create Your Own Erotic Fantasy by Michael Hemmingson
So after all that, I’m interested in – but hesitant to go YAY about – Harper Ingram’s new project, Follow Your Fantasy (available for pre-order here).
The Guardian UK recently regurgitated Harper’s press release as editorial content if you want to know more:
A threesome, sex with a stranger or work on a porn film: the choice will be yours, as HarperCollins prepares to launch an erotic version of the Choose Your Own Adventure books which were wildly popular in the 1980s.
This time, though, rather than pretending to be a deep-sea explorer searching for the lost city of Atlantis, or a space traveller born on a spaceship travelling between galaxies, “you” are a woman who has been stood up in a swish hotel bar. When a stranger mistakes you for a high-class escort, slips you an envelope full of cash and invites you to his room, the first of many choices begins.
Follow Your Fantasy, which will be out just in time for Valentine’s Day from the publisher’s digital romance imprint HarperImpulse, is written by the pseudonymous Nicola Jane, and is pitched as “a new type of erotica which gives the power back to the reader”. There are 44 chapters, said HarperCollins, 22 of which “include hot sex of some kind, 18 advance the story and only four take the reader out with no action, leaving them free to go back and choose again”.
Erotic adventures could include “enticing two young men into a memorable threesome”, “dinner with a stressed-out executive involv[ing] more than food on the table”, or a visit to a porn set. “Remember, even if you choose submission, the control is still all yours,” says the publisher.
Oh neat, it’s a cliché rodeo. :(
An excerpt from first part of Follow Your Fantasy is here, and Harper’s blog follows it with part two and three.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed and let you know if it’s worth a look in my next Kink Your Kindle post.
