Hot Off the Presses scours the internet for newly published debut books from unknown authors, and saves everyone else the trouble of actually reading books to find out if they’re good or not. New posts every Tuesday, or apparently whenever I feel like it. This is meant for entertainment purposes only, not serious consumer advice. And there will be spoilers.

This isn’t your ordinary dirty book, people. This one. This one is a lot. If you’re the sort of person who can read about a young lady being anime-awkward-horny around a snake because she just had an erotic dream about him and doesn’t know how to broach the subject, and you don’t have follow-up questions, then read on. Also delete me from your phone. His Forbidden Mate by Julie L. Vance answers the age old question: but what if the guy is a snake, though?

In proper “Trapped In A Island With Josh Hutchinson” style, our story strobes between the perspective of Aella, the scrappy female human protagonist, and Amon, her handsome love interest. The story begins as Aella, or Ella to her friends who are very keen to save one letter, tries to protect a young girl named Saphira from the Grays. OK, some background. We get a flashback in chapter one, which I must admit is very slightly better than a prologue, so it gets a hesitant thumbs up from me. Earth has been visited by Roswell Grays, aka those aliens that have been building pyramids and trolling Nostradamus all these years, only they’re real and they suck. Aella takes time out of her busy day of being chased by cliché 50s aliens to explain to the reader how the Ir’rlyeh or whatever the Grays call themselves came to Earth and started experimenting on random Earthlings for reasons unknown. They started a war that claimed the lives of our protagonist’s mother and father, along with billions of others, in the name of some unstated scientific curiosity. Seriously, it’s never explained what the Grays have to gain from performing bizarre experiments on unconsenting humans. Maybe they just have a lot of unfinished work to do on their BB cream. Whatever they want, in the present day Aella is cowering in a collapsed parking garage when some snake dragon aliens arrive. Aella treats these new aliens as just another threat and tries to fight them off, despite knowing full well that these are the new, good aliens who have come to humanity’s aid in the fight against the Rl’y’aeh. She’s injured in the scuffle and wakes up in the hospital.

Amon, her sex dragon benefactor, escorts the injured woman to a hospital, and falls into a very predictable pattern of behavior, like any good clockwork love interest. He is constantly fawning over how wonderful humans and Earth are. They’re so resilient! It’s so beautiful with its several colors of lake! Humans are the only race to resist the Rl’rl, and the Earth is the only planet with… clouds? It seems? The other thing he is constantly doing is bioluminescence, but we’re told that he did a little squirt of glowy stuff that normally signals when one of his species has found their One True Mate. Glad they spelled that one out for me. His 70s buddy cop movie partner Calliope thinks it’s for her, while we all know it was for the human lady bleeding out in a collapsed parking garage. Calliope spends a good chunk of the book begging to get plowed, but the triangular comedy of errors premise is dropped immediately, and she just turns evil instead, which was obvious from the beginning. We know she can’t be the one for Amon, because he wants “many hatchlings,” and she doesn’t want lots of babies (unlike you, reader!). Luckily she’s already painfully hard for the other fleet commander Malekith, so it’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine. It’s fine. But it wouldn’t be the Jedi if they didn’t have baffling rules against hard-bodied young people slapping their barely compatible flaps together. It seems Amon disobeyed the craven bureaucrats of the Galactic Idiot Council to intervene on Earth’s behalf, but I guess boning a human is harder to come back from than starting a war.

Despite being a furry (or a guess they’re called “scalies” when they’re a snake), Amon makes a perfect Austinian love interest. He is physically sturdy, emotionally uncomplicated, and initially supportive of all the stuffy traditions you can convince him to break with you. He exudes confidence, but not in a way that you can’t get him to pick you. I’m not sure if Fitzwilliam Darcy Esquire had reptilian hemipenes, but somebody out there has always visualized him that way, and this is their Twilight. The general premise of the book is bonkers, and only gets worse. There is a grand ancient alien story arc, even though the Grays’ motivations never really made much sense. Seriously, they could just steal our medical books. We even made an insultingly easy to follow TV show based on our most famous anatomy textbook. There is an egg-laying scene in this book. There’s even a unicorn, but Vance immediately informs us it’s not really a mythical unicorn as we know it. Thanks, Julie. I knew it wasn’t a real unicorn. I figured that out. But none of that bothers me. It’s not even the clit-bookisms. A clit-bookism is when an author, who I remind you is writing dripping, salty smut for money on the internet, is too bashful to say the word “clit.” His Forbidden Mate drives right down the grassy median by alternating clit with things like “her most erogenous nub,” “her awakened anatomy,” or “the little bundle of nerves between her legs.” Oh! I know! Is it her clit? It’s her clit that’s between her legs, isn’t it? Did I guess right, Julie? Did I win a prize? No. That’s not my problem. What broke me was simply the fact that this fifty thousand page grimoire of bonk-beasts was the straw that finally broke me.

I’ve read books before that made me feel like the orphanage lady from Fantastic Beasts, only with hucow and feet-fisting as the stand in for magical children. I try to remind myself that I, me, the author of this blog, am and is a filthy rat person who likes things that would redden the cheeks of Burt Ward’s parole officer. But it never works. My primitive monkey brain knows only two facts: bad thing bad, and other monkey who like bad thing also bad. It’s the same reason why, anytime someone tells me they like a food I personally find unpalatable, I just quietly wait for them to stop talking, while trying to ascertain what they think they stand to gain from lying to my face about something so trivial. Usually I get through a dirty book about asymmetrical butts or erotic ear cleaning out of a sheer fascination for anything that makes me uncomfortable, my self preservation and self destruction in perfect equilibrium. But sometimes a book tips the scales with one little drop of kink, and it happened in His Forbidden Mate when they got to the (entirely snake-based, by the way) lactation scene.

So… so, let me just work out at my own speed how a lactation fetish works. So there’s boobs, right? Feel free to check my math, but I’m sure we’re all onboard so far. And while much of the visible structure is what could be politely termed decorative, there is also a functional side to the human breast. I get that bodies are complex and wonderful, and they can be significant and purposeful in a lot of different ways. But not all at the same time, usually. Nobody says “Yeah, give me that hot load. I love thinking about all the PTA meetings we’re gonna go to because of your jizz. Let’s make this act of reproduction explicitly about child care.” So whatever, you cross the streams by incorporating milk into your love-making. And then, and I know this is part of it because it’s in all the smutty books don’t even try to fight me on this, you have to talk about it. You do your revolting business, and then you have some dialogue about how “these will make our babies grow big and strong, yum yum.” Yes, that’s right; this is now officially a sex-negative book review blog. Hide your perfectly healthy and harmless fetish about spanking or, I don’t know, Canola oil, because here comes another miserable old biddy to rid the world of any and all forms of fun. I am Zardoz. The penis is evil. The gun is good. You did this to me, Julie Vance.

Is this book for you? Probably. You’re all sick bastards if you read this far. His Forbidden Mate is four dollars on Kindle, which is pretty cheap for its length. It definitely delivers on the promise, or threat, of Na’avi snake sex, and I can’t say I’ve read anything quite like it before. Just buy it. Maybe you’ll get anime-awkward-horny.

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My fetish is seeing Madeline in pain.

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