GETTING FREAKY WITH FRANKENSTEIN
Why I Go To Bed With ‘Monster Smut’
Novels about women who have sex with beasts are — on more than one level — hot. What’s behind the trend?
I once spent three days interviewing romance novelists at a trade show, and one of the surprises of the assignment was that most of them defined themselves as feminists.
At the time, I took it as a sign that the women — and they were all women — hoped my newspaper would rebut a stereotype: that romance novelists were throwbacks to a pre-liberated era. That was easy to do, given that my sources were educated and intelligent women who had shifted their focus after successful careers in fields such as journalism or business.
But there’s a new wrinkle in the bedsheets. Or so I found when put aside Sally Rooney as my bedtime reading and turned to a publishing trend that — on more than one level — is white-hot: “monster smut” or “monster romance,” novels about women who lust after mythical or other beasts.
I picked up one of the brightest stars in that exploding field, C.M. Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm, looking for answers to the obvious questions it raises.
