I began to lust for each fetish soon after opening Alison Tyler’s recent book F is for Fetish. A bike mechanic’s smudged, strong hands, golden showers from a goddess in a clawfoot bathtub, and decadently soiled maribou slippers -- each of these quickly drew me in. Thomas Roche’s wild, messy goth queer girls in “Switchblade” and Rachel Kramer Bussel’s dreamy, smolderingly hot “Fishnet Queen” featuring a regal and sensual Old Hollywood glamorous domme are among the highlights in this anthology of startlingly original and hot stories featuring a wide variety of fetishes. It doesn’t hurt that discovering and luxuriating in a fetish leads to extremely hot sex in these stories.

Each story in this collection features a distinct moment where the plot falls away and the story is devoted to its fetish object, specifying its particular hotness and how it makes the narrator feel – one young man tastes his Mistress’s toes through her musky fishnets with adoration and lust; a hungry boot slut inhales the whiff of acrid boot polish melting in the hot sun as she kneels to polish a series of military boots. The stories were very hot for that very intensity, that rareness. It wasn’t all hardcore sex in this anthology (though there was plenty of that, too.)

My one disappointment with the anthology was “Foot Binding Revisited” by Stan Kent. The premise is that because the narrator’s girlfriend is both drunk and Chinese, she mutely submits to having her feet bound together with pantyhose in reference to the historical practice of foot-binding. I expected her to at least be a little surprised, offended, or eagerly into it, but not mute assent. These stereotyped assumptions really stopped me from enjoying what could have been a very hot story. With that exception, all of the stories in F is for Fetish were stellar.

G is for Games sounds promising with its theme of “games of skill and chance,” but the anthology features only a few really sensational stories. Kristina Wright’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” about a young man tied in a closet so that he is “forced” be the object of desire for a series of increasingly more aggressive and sexy women visitors was the best of the lot, and very hot and squirm-inducing; “The Big Touchdown” by Erica Dumas was surprisingly steamy as well, featuring a convincing cheerleader and football player in the back seat on touchdown night. Alison Tyler’s “The Game” revved things up at the end with an edgy tale of sex and BDSM among a group of queer women rock stars and groupies, but overall, the rest of the anthology was only mediocre, especially next to the soaring delights of F is for Fetish.

I recommend reading G is for Games for the very good stories mixed in with the rest. F is for Fetish is a fabulous collection of stories with a fetish for everyone. Overall, I was impressed by the quality of stories in both of these anthologies, I love that they are in a small, easily digestible format, and will look for future books in the series as I eagerly look forward to new stories selected by Alison Tyler for these naughty little Erotic Alphabet books.