"Collared & Leashed" by Chris Bellows
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 12:00 am
I don't know how many people here have been following this guy's career. Everything he's done to date has been published by Pink Flamingo. He even wrote a freebie a novella specially for the Archive called "The Anguished E".
I was quite impressed with his first title, "A Gift From James". I was dissatisfied with some of his subsequent titles since they seemed too obsessed with pain, torture and hideously cruel unnecessary surgeries. But I figured: to each his own.
His latest one is called "Collared & Leashed" and it is more of a return to form with respect to the orginal "A Gift From James", and is quite erotic in spots, erotic in the sense that it appeals to a specific fetish for female domination initiated castration.
The main problem with this latest fiction offering from Bellows is something that has plagued his books right from the outset: horrendously misused big words. A reader can sympathize with his efforts to use big words since they tend to suggest a cool, haughty, abstracted demeanor on the part of the dominant female characters. But he consistently misuses them. The misuse occurs on the average of two per page. This results in quite a few otherwise worthy passages being ruined by a rude, stiff thumb in the eye, figurately speaking, of a number of badly misused words.
It finally became too much for me. I deleted the "Collared & Leashed" ebook and uninstalled the Pink Flamingo ebook reader from my PC and threw out my hard copy of "A Gift From James". I wash my hands of the guy.
I don't see a lot of point in speculating what causes this behavior on Bellows' part, or why his editor at Pink Flamingo doesn't try harder to clean up these egregious mistakes. But two possible explanations occurred to me: 1) he's just not a very verbally oriented guy, he's probably more of a science and tech head, or 2) he resents having to cater to readers with these fetishes and this word-misuse thing is an outward sign of this inner rebellion. Or both, ha ha.
One could also make the argument that these books are only intended for a semi-literate audience, and that the general meaning of each of these big words can generally be sensed by a semi-literate reader by the way they sound. I can't really argue with that, but I really think it would have been more decent and honest to have tried to achieve that oh-so-crucial haughty effect by only using words that a semi-literate could readily understand, instead of this tricky, cheating, short-cut way that Bellows has chosen.
This whole thing is quite disappointing to me since Bellows is one of the few porn writers who seemed to be halfway catering to a castration fetish.
Well this has been on my chest, so to speak, for about a week now and now that I've gotten it off, I feel much better.
Thanks for listening.
I was quite impressed with his first title, "A Gift From James". I was dissatisfied with some of his subsequent titles since they seemed too obsessed with pain, torture and hideously cruel unnecessary surgeries. But I figured: to each his own.
His latest one is called "Collared & Leashed" and it is more of a return to form with respect to the orginal "A Gift From James", and is quite erotic in spots, erotic in the sense that it appeals to a specific fetish for female domination initiated castration.
The main problem with this latest fiction offering from Bellows is something that has plagued his books right from the outset: horrendously misused big words. A reader can sympathize with his efforts to use big words since they tend to suggest a cool, haughty, abstracted demeanor on the part of the dominant female characters. But he consistently misuses them. The misuse occurs on the average of two per page. This results in quite a few otherwise worthy passages being ruined by a rude, stiff thumb in the eye, figurately speaking, of a number of badly misused words.
It finally became too much for me. I deleted the "Collared & Leashed" ebook and uninstalled the Pink Flamingo ebook reader from my PC and threw out my hard copy of "A Gift From James". I wash my hands of the guy.
I don't see a lot of point in speculating what causes this behavior on Bellows' part, or why his editor at Pink Flamingo doesn't try harder to clean up these egregious mistakes. But two possible explanations occurred to me: 1) he's just not a very verbally oriented guy, he's probably more of a science and tech head, or 2) he resents having to cater to readers with these fetishes and this word-misuse thing is an outward sign of this inner rebellion. Or both, ha ha.
One could also make the argument that these books are only intended for a semi-literate audience, and that the general meaning of each of these big words can generally be sensed by a semi-literate reader by the way they sound. I can't really argue with that, but I really think it would have been more decent and honest to have tried to achieve that oh-so-crucial haughty effect by only using words that a semi-literate could readily understand, instead of this tricky, cheating, short-cut way that Bellows has chosen.
This whole thing is quite disappointing to me since Bellows is one of the few porn writers who seemed to be halfway catering to a castration fetish.
Well this has been on my chest, so to speak, for about a week now and now that I've gotten it off, I feel much better.
Thanks for listening.