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 maybe Wednesday? This is meant for entertainment purposes only, not serious consumer advice. And there will be spoilers.

What do you look for in your erotica? Nonsense? Faff? Extraneous things like relatable character motivation? You’ll be getting none of that claptrap from Eve Roxx, and you should thank her for it. Realm of Monsters is an isekai erotic fantasy that asks the question: how many dudes can you stack on top of yourself before it compromises your structural integrity?

Madison is playing the bouzouki in her apartment when our story begins. This establishes right away what an insatiable strumpet she is. That’s story telling right there. Actually, I get the impression this woman does enough pearl diving that the downstairs neighbors are complaining about water damage. Of course, we don’t know right away that she’s in her apartment; instead we are treated to her fantasy of boinking her cop partner on a stake-out, with a brief aside about how hot it would be to bring any of the other hard-bodied young men on the force into the mix. Make note of that, it’ll be a theme. Storytelling! Honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised that our protagonist has a discernable personality at all.

While Madison is ringing the Devil’s doorbell, someone rings her actual doorbell. Just kidding, they don’t. They kick it down because they’re the SWAT team. At first, Madison has trouble processing this, and her first instinct is to incorporate it into the fantasy, like a fire engine that blasts past your window while you’re having a dream about pirates or something. But alas, it’s a very real SWAT team, and since Madison is white and a cop, they do her the favor of arresting her alive, on the charge of murdering her boss.

This notion of half the police force in riot gear going absolutely nuts on a woman in her living room is thematically appropriate, since Ev- I mean Madison’s big Thing is group sex. That’s a fine kink to have if that’s your thing, but it’s definitely not for me. I have enough anxiety about disappointing one person at a time. I mean, how do you even keep track of whose hand is where, especially when everybody is covered in the same sweat and lube… Uh, sorry I got distracted thinking about sports.

Anyway, I love this scene. When I first started reading, I was ready for some generic crypto-prologue about a mashed potato sculpture qua protagonist and her shitty job at the not-getting-pounded factory. Instead I got a shameless fantasy that combines blatant violations of HR’s Me Too era dating policies with not even doing your damn job in the first place, a heroine who is so horny her brain fog is only gently wafted out of the way by armed intruders, and a fantastic hook to draw me into the next chapter. Bravo, Eve Roxx.

So there’s a sham trial in which Madison is convicted of killing her extremely murdered commissioner. They planted the weapon on her, put a manifesto on her computer, CGI’d a deepfake of her saying she wanted to kill her boss, jammed a “you’re fired, Madison!” note into the dead woman’s hands, sprayed Madison’s DNA on every surface of the room with a Windex bottle, collected an army of supposed eye witnesses including the Pope and a bald eagle, created a profile for her on KillYourBossWithBullets.com, and invented the entire future predicting apparatus from Minority Report. You know, all the lengths you have to go to to convict a cop of wrong-doing. Apparently, Madison made their job easier by facing disciplinary action in the past for… you guessed it! Beating up a child molester. This is such a default way to show what a loose-cannon-Johnson cop protagonists are. Where are the cops who are on thin ice because they refuse to upgrade to the latest broken version of Google Calendar? Are there no more heroes left?

You probably guessed someone has framed Madison to use her for some nefarious purpose. Instead of going to cop prison (another fantasy trope), she is carted away to a secret science location, where Elon Musk and some scientist with a severe ponytail and glasses (No, she doesn’t get a makeover later; I was surprised as well) shove her into a secret science room and pull a lever. This zaps her into some mysterious realm… a monstrous realm, one might say. Waking up in an unknown place after being subjected to terrifying experimental procedures, Madison hears the rhythmic, rutting sounds of a man in the throws of passion, through a wall that appears to have no door. Now, try and guess what is going through our protagonist’s mind at this point. If you guessed “She is angry and sad that she cannot get through the wall to the sex that is probably happening on the other side,” you win. Actually, we all win. This woman is amazing. The middle of the book consists of Madison settling in to this strange place, and the three juicy cock monsters who inhabit it.

The titular (heh) Realm of Monsters is a place where there’s foosball and air hockey, a world where jacuzzi water makes great lube and nobody ever feels jealous or itchy. Madison finds herself in plenty of Xsomes, but never the “Devil’s Threesome” with another girl. In fact, in a curious distaff case of the Not Gays, Madison takes every opportunity to remind the reader how unappealing she finds every woman she knows, up to and including the evil scientist lady who zaps her to the Bone Zone. I guess if you’re going to write a straight power fantasy orgy simulator, you could do worse than being the meat in a double-decker sex hoagie, half a dozen chunky kielbasas rolling around your plate… I mean, if you’re into that. I don’t see the appeal. Shut up, you’re confused.

This book is adorable. I didn’t even talk about the ending, with what is possibly the most petty, trivial, satisfying revenge subplot that has ever gone down in a fast food restaurant. That’s what I like to see, bringing it home after a couple hundred pages of dick Jenga: wacky hijinks. Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice Eve Roxx out here making up categories so she can be Amazon’s best seller in “Occult Occultism.” Fully earned, fair and square. Realm of Monsters is a delight, and it’s four dollars on Kindle.

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Does eating an entire pizza by myself count as getting laid?

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