Love is an Open Road: the Longest Story

Mr. Felcher’s Grand Emporium, or, The Adventures of a Pair of Spares in the Fine Art of Gentlemanly Portraiture by Eric Alan Westfall clocks in at well over 200k words, making it easily the longest story in the Love is an Open Road collection.

I loved Westfall’s installment last year (The Rake, the Rogue, and the Roue), because it was written with language appropriate for its era, and it was filthy and smutty and fascinating. So while I was slightly intimidated by the length of Mr. Felcher’s, I was still anticipating reading it.

But I had to give up about half-way through. It isn’t bad, and it’s still filthy and fascinating and smutty and period-appropriate, it’s just also fuck-tons of digressions (to the point where I can’t follow what is happening when), and it seems to lack even the vestigial plot that last year’s book had.

Now there will be people who love this book, and I fully believe that it deserves to have tons of dedicated fans. But I’m just not one of them.

The premise is that two young man (“spares” or second-sons) are introduced to all the pleasures and porn of an alternate Victorian England (where you won’t be killed for being gay, but will probably be ostracized and possibly gay-bashed). The two young men go right from “hey, pr0n!” to having oodles of public and semi-public sex with pretty much any cock they can get their hands on (or so it felt). There are far more detailed descriptions of cocks than I have ever seen elsewhere, even if you added them all up in one. And There were lots of pop-culture references, some of them were period-appropriate, like when the characters quote Shakespeare, and some were clearly just for the entertainment of the modern reader (a roundabout joke about Viagra, for example), but others I wasn’t sure about (a rhyming couplet from a Christmas song that a character thought, but without context to imply if he knew the song, or was just thinking a thought which the author made use of for the audience).

But like I said, there were infinite digressions of all calibers, where you’d be reading and then three pages later be reminded that you’re still in the middle of the character trying to detail a metaphor for why his cock is like a tree, or whatever.

I also didn’t like the public sex. Or, that’s not a good way to explain it, because I do like a good voyeur/exhibitionist story. So it wasn’t the basic fact of public (or non-private) sex, so much as it was the absurd lengths that the…uh…Emporium went to to make sure that ALL THE SEX was public, and not just some of it. There were ways to invite or not invite people in to join you, but no mention of a way to close the peep holes. It was just…absurdly complicated set-ups for everything, that still didn’t allow for privacy (you could leave if you didn’t like it), and even though the guys were all terrified of being found out as “Neddy boys,” they still would whip their cocks out for all to see.

Plus the digressions (let me mention them a third time), which would occasionally leave me confused as to what the overly-described position even WAS…and I just couldn’t get into it. I tried and I tried, and I couldn’t do it.