Review: Cute Boy Gets Squeezed by D.L. King

A big thank you to Alison Tyler, who's let me take part in the blog tour for her new anthology The Big Book of Bondage. Check out her blog, Trollop with a Laptop, for links to all the other reviews. I'm talking about D.L. King's story, one of 25 in this new offering from Cleis Press. So without further ado:

The real star of this story is not endearingly submissive Cute Boy or his kooky-but-caring play pal Evangeline; it’s a piece of equipment. The vac bed, to be precise – latex sheets out of which the air is sucked leaving the sub cocooned so tightly they can’t even twitch but with every contour of their body on display. I’d hazard a guess that most bedroom kinksters don’t have one and have probably never encountered one for real (go on, hop over to Google Images, I'll wait). And that’s what makes this story so irresistible. It’s the stuff of fantasy for most, rendered real in tantalising detail. The description of Cute Boy’s experience in the vac bed gains weight from the sparseness of description elsewhere; what the characters look like is largely left to the reader’s imagination.

The story has an easy, conversational style from the first-person viewpoint of Cute Boy. That’s in keeping with the casual nature of the relationship involved. There’s no romance and little emotional interaction here. But set against that is the intensity of Cute Boy’s physical need and his experience with this piece of equipment. Eve is no stereotypical Domme either; she’s more of a facilitator for his pleasure. She sounds more than a little bonkers and for Cute Boy there’s a thrill in the anticipation, the uncertainty, over what she’s going to come up with while knowing that, fundamentally, she’s not dangerous. Although there’s no seduction involved, she does constantly reassure him in her light-hearted way that everything is going to be ‘fun’.

It’s common for BDSM stories to try to untangle the psychology of submission or look for some reason for it in a person’s past experience. But that assumes a narrative viewpoint from outside of the world of kink, a place where justification and rationale might be demanded. Right at the start of the story, King openly dismisses this when Cute Boy begins to explain his kink and trails off with the words ‘yada yada yada’. But the whole story is, in a wonderfully subtle way, an exposition of a physical and psychological need that, in this case, seems to be completely natural. There are several moments when Cute Boy (who also goes by the name Pete!) has reservations – when Eve points out his ‘nice cock’ to her housemate, when there is the suggestion that said housemate is going to take photos of him, when she introduces the butt plug. But his expressions of unease are overwhelmed by his need. And when he sees the vac bed, his deep desire to feel its embrace shuts off the noise in his head and renders him hopelessly, sweetly, compliant. Add in a couple of toys and it leads to an orgasm the likes of which he’s never had before.

Cute Boy Gets Squeezed appears to be a simple, casual tale, but beneath its easy style lies an intensity of experience and a depth of knowledge about the nature of submission and restraint that is anything but.