Crash Your Party Dress

by Adrian Hunter

Crash Your Party Dress is one of two anthologies of Adrian Hunter's smooth and kinky short stories available from Renaissance E Books that explores both the beauty and the beast of bondage through the eyes of its mostly-willing participants. Hauntingly erotic and occasionally hilarious, Hunter populates his friction fiction with unforgettable characters and scenes that capture the tension, the confusion and the compulsion of those who are driven to dominate, and especially those who willingly submit. Editor's This title is also available in paperback from Xlibris.com, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. [Cover photograph by Felix Dartmouth/Archives BBS]

140 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 2001

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Pamela Langhorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the back cover of this anthology is this amusing and interesting quote:

"It's been said that lives have been changed by Adrian Hunter's words. Some beg to differ. Others simply beg."

In this day and age of bought publicity quotes where the quoter has no knowledge of the work and was just paid to write something positive, a quote like the above is a breath of fresh air and flat out funny. Besides, I read another novel of his, Once Bitten, which he co-wrote with Chelsea Shepard so I knew he could write on various levels. I wasn't disappointed at all.

As in his other work mentioned above, sex is a major but secondary theme of this anthology. Instead, the stories contained in the first anthology of his are more about a person's desires and how they relate to others. He does not spend a lot of time analyzing the character's needs or wants and instead follows the character as he or she tries to satisfy that need or want. Their desire may be nebulous or it might be concrete and just waiting for the right incident to fulfill it. In the course of filling the need, the character must relate to others and that is where the real story lies. In no way shape or form, is this work or any others of his that I have read so far, the nonsense so popular today⁠—Hi, I'm going to get naked now and lets get it on because we have no other reason for being⁠—no plot, no storyline, no theme, nothing but sex.

The anthology is split nearly in held between his long novella titled Isabel and a number of short stories, including one by Chelsea Shepard. Isabel opens the anthology and is an incredible erotic read. Isabel was always interested in bondage and through the wonder of computers and the Internet, meets a number of individuals interested in the same thing. One person is Ron who seems to be more interested in her as a person than as a sexual toy. He actually asks her about her thoughts and feelings on a wide range of issue and gets to know her as a person, not as a pleasure receptacle. He eventually invites her to come to him for a week of total submission and she accepts. From the moment she steps into his world she feels what it is like to be totally under another's control every single minute. Her week with Ron becomes an emotional as well as a sexual adventure as she finds out more about herself while he does various things to her and showcases her to his friends. But why stop at just a week?

While all the short stories are very good in this anthology, one really caught my eye, especially for its ability to mess with the reader's head. Titled Sweet Butterfly by Chelsea Shepard, this story packs a very hard mental punch in its few short pages. As the story opens the author writes,

"My whole body, dangling from the glass ceiling like a ripe fruit, is covered in sweat. This is what being in a jungle must feel like. This is what hanging from a huge tree in a jungle must feel like. At night. Under the stars. The world at my feet. Except I'm the one who is being played with and I'm not sure I like it."

Little did she know when she innocently suggested to her male friend that they spend a little bondage time, that she would wind up buck naked, chained and hoisted to the ceiling of a hothouse. After getting her naked and wrapped up in chains, he applies a sweet smelling jell like substance to her nipples and between her legs. Then he hoists her up top the roof of the hothouse where she can see and be seen hanging in the moonlight.

This unnamed woman does not like bugs and has already seen one butterfly flitting around between the plants. But if there is one there has to be more and she begins to get some idea of what is in store for her as a butterfly flies up to meet her.

"Its velvet-soft wings flap across my bare skin, and a fain moan escapes my gagged mouth. The butterfly takes no notice as it lands on my nipple and begins to suck it, or whatever butterflies do. The flowery fragrance, the light and by the look of it, the taste of the potion makes me the perfect bug attraction!"

And she is, helpless as well, as more and more butterflies land on her to partake of her sweet body. While she is terrorized by the butterflies crawling and tasting her body, she is also aroused by them. Their delicate probing and touching drives her towards orgasmic bliss while at the same time she is horrified as to what is happening. Is this the way madness lies?

These are just two of the very arousing stories in this anthology. The writing is detailed and intense and the whole work is more about the mental musings of the characters and less about the sexual aspects of the acts. Instead of analyzing the why of desire, each story accepts the desire as given and then works on how the need is satisfied to the pleasure of all the characters involved. Like the very enjoyable novel, Once Bitten (reviewed by me as well), Crash Your Party Dress is much more than simple adult graphic sexuality on the page. Both works explore the human in each of us and the wants and desires that fuel our daily existence.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hunter's stories are well-written and interesting, but certainly not for everyone; in fact, though I was curious what a classic in this genre would be, it wasn't particularly for me either. This is a collection of the stories which Hunter published online, some connected and some not, and which then brought him recognition as an outstanding writer of bondage erotica; he was one of the first writers whose reputations was essentially "made" by the internet. In fact, his reputation has progressed to the point where he's now considered one of the foremost writers of contemporary erotica, with this collection considered a classic of the genre. The collection, though, is actually focused a great deal on tension and explanation of detail. The characters are well-writ and believable, but most are drawn from the same fabric: questioning why they want what they want, and how they got where they are. Detail-wise, Hunter's focus isn't where you might expect it to be in erotica---primarily, the graphic nature of different writings comes from devices and "costuming", or logistics, as opposed to intimate relations. In the end, this wasn't quite what I expected.