The catch with erotic stories is that 99% of them end the same way...with an orgasm. They come, they see, they come. Knowing this often times leaves a writer with having to find a creative way to fill the gap between having sex and not having sex and does little to prevent the reader from skipping the fluff and getting to the juicy bits. Ford handles his fluff brilliantly, however; his eye for detail and characterization in his short stories is awesome. However, when reading a book of this volume (377 pages) and that’s all erotic stories, trying to finish it becomes a start-stop-start affair, which isn’t Ford’s fault; it’s just the nature of the genre. Back-to-back sex scenes end up becoming monotonous and draining (in more ways than one). The stroke stories as a whole are, however, well-described and excellently delivered, particularly "The Eye of the Beholder", a refreshing break from the perfectly built and chiseled men which inhabit a large number of stories in the genre.

However, Ford overshoots his boundaries quite a few times in this novel in an attempt to deliver a gritty narrative, such as in "Diving the Pit" and "Remembering". All of the stories are told from the same first-person viewpoint which makes the anthology come off as boring and unadventurous. Granted, this can vary according to the individual palette, but as a whole, erotic stories are meant to be taken in small doses, as originally intended.