"Meat. There are so many interpretations of the word. One of the very reasons this anthology intrigued me when it fell into my own meat flower--my naked lap. Honestly, when first I cracked it, I was expecting something altogether different. Something male and musky. Another hot whack-fantasy entry from the gay world, perhaps. Imagine my surprise when the very first story was a short, clever little tale of a woman's seduction in a Parisian butcher shop, by a man with "black eyes, spiraled, coiled Tunisian hair, biblical teeth..." Helena Settimana's The Horse Butcher's Son set the tone for what would be the most exotic literary liaison I've stumbled into, in a very long time.

The stories in The Best Of The Best Meat Erotica run the gamut from beautifully written erotica to hardcore smut--all with "meat," in all its various carnal interpretations, as its inspiration. Many, like the first, are set in butcher's shops, restaurants and even the occasional deli. Some mention meat only in passing, paying acknowledgement to the theme, if not wholly embracing it. Others make a special note of tenderizing the tubesteak one might expect from a book with "meat" as its primary subject. Still others, however, discover new and intriguing ways to dip into the gravy bowl of the anthology's sinewy muse.

A prison inmate goes from yardbird to ranchhand, while dishing out sex and more to the dusty, all-but-faded residents of a rich man's questionable paradise in Jeremy Russell's pulpy Western entry, Beefmasters. Chinese legend is reinterpreted and a tyrant king's wanton lusts revealed, in Peter Huston's cautionary tale, The Meat Forest And The Wine Lake. A wannabe dyke dabbles with a meat-free existence in the hopes of fitting in with her kinky peers in Lisa Montanarelli's amusing Sapphic fable, Vegan Lesbian Boarding School Hookers In Bondage.

Then there are the more fantastical elements, composed from blood rich drippings of ironic mythos and disemboweled dreams. A joy boy fresh off the streets is transported to a land of twisted fairytale and feathered evil, where he becomes the special of the day, in David Nickle's The Bird Feeders. A modern day Frankenstein creates the perfect loyal sex toy, only to find himself drawn into a savage partnership marked by primal feeding frenzies and brutal sexual expression in Mel Smith's Wolf-Boy. A down-on-her-luck actress finds more notoriety than she dreamed possible after a supermarket liaison between a vegan pepperoni and her chatty nether mouth is captured on film, in Ian Philips' gleefully fractured fable, Love In The Time Of Cold Cuts.

There are more, so many more, hot and chewy tales of fleshly seduction and carnivorously insatiable appetite in this juicy, marbled entry from editor Greg Wharton. Twenty in all and each as surprising as the last. All of which makes Wharton's claim to "some of the most imaginative and thought-provoking erotic writing of the year--perhaps the decade," all that much more tantalizing and, in a way, true. If all themed erotica anthologies were this creative, they could very well redefine the genre. Because sometimes, being the "best" doesn't necessarily come from having the word in the title, so much as it does from having the editorial chops to deliver it."

—Oberon, Blue Food