Ah, those were the days!

You knew what you were about to get.

The fact that many of those now legendary magazines also boasted stories by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, Isaac Asimov, or Raymond Chandler--stuff that has wonderfully survived both the passage of time and the coming of political correctness on magazine covers--easily demonstrates that the visuals on offer seldom had much relevance to the tales published inside those now-yellowing pages.

Thus was I mistaken from an early age onwards in thinking that genre literature, which I have never tired of as both reader and writer, automatically entailed thrills of a gently sexual nature. So, when in my teens I began writing romantic tales of lost planets and galactic corsairs, I as a matter of course liberally added love stories and damsels in a state of undress and even a hint of sexuality. Now I know why I was never a successful science fiction writer! Sex in space? The readers clearly disapproved.

I later moved on to writing crime and mystery, albeit in a rather noir way, but even though the field lent itself even better to the introduction of sexual mores, publishers and readers soon made it abundantly clear that it should be kept off the page or, at any rate, between chapters.

But for me, stories--whether they be SF, crime, whatever genre--are primarily about human beings: men and women. And the interaction between them, which somehow does entail a fair amount of sex. Call me a sexual obsessive, but I strongly believe that sex is one of the main things that makes all of us tick and accordingly, should be part and parcel of any story that is written. You cannot pretend to understand even a portion of the abyss that is the human mind and condition without taking sex and relationships into account.

Which probably explains why I have become more of an erotic writer, even though I still liberally adopt plots and situations openly influenced by primarily the crime and mystery genre in my stories of love and fury, of sorrow and death. It took me a long time, but I finally found my niche as a big fish in a small pond. It is a stretch of water I finally feel comfortable swimming in.

This 'Coming Together' anthology skims over many genres from crime and mystery to even SF, but most importantly, it is full of consummate storytelling. And those stories, full of blood, sex, secretions, emotions and excitement, are all the more alive for their uncensored view of human frailties and sexual encounters of all kinds. Which in my eyes, makes them real, believable.

Regardless of gender, I wouldn't mind being a protagonist in any of these stories, providing I reach the end page alive, of course ... So I envy you this journey through these pages: some of the writers I already knew from having had the pleasure of publishing them in my annual Mammoth Erotica anthologies, while others were new to me. But they are all magicians in whose hands word becomes flesh: an alchemy that only the best erotic writing can offer.

Enjoy at your peril.

~ Maxim Jakubowski