Fucking Day: Eternal Hearts

Erotica seems easy until you try to write it. Suddenly there are only so many euphemisms for taint, you’re using adjectives like “glistening,” and you’re trying to figure out what a minotaur penis would look like. But, hear me out, what if you wrote a book of erotica that abandoned the concept of eroticism entirely? What if it was mostly just about supernatural monsters joylessly mashing their glistening taints together? We don’t have to wonder, because Vampire: The Masquerade – Eternal Hearts exists.

Written by Lucy Taylor and set in the world of the edgiest tabletop roleplaying game of the ’90s, Eternal Hearts is, as we say in literary circles, a rough hang. In a truly generational self-own, the premise of the book is entirely undone on the first page.

Why indeed! See, in Vampire, the Kindred (vampires) can’t fuck, eat, or really enjoy anything but drinking blood. That is the tragedy of the undead — while they will live to see the release of Half-Life 3, they will take no pleasure in playing it.

Great! So we’re going into the horny vampire book knowing that nobody is going to be into any of the proceedings. With our expectations appropriately calibrated, let’s begin.

Taylor just jumps right into it. The very first scene of the book is a gang rape slash execution, followed by the victim waking up underground and desperately trying to figure out what’s going on. I just realized that a lot of the excerpts of this book aren’t going to be much fun to read, so you’ll forgive me if I make some slight edits, Mad Libs style.

I guess we have to consider context here. In the ’90s, this was genuinely shocking stuff, very much in line with Vampire‘s intent of freaking out the norms. But today, the average high school graduate has seen so much buried alive stepmom porno that this would barely even register in their burned-out neural pathways.

With that in mind, I can excuse the edge. But we’ve got bigger problems. Lucy Taylor signed up for ENG301 – The Art of Hole without ever completing the prerequisites. She just isn’t a very good writer. Take her description of the character we’ve been watching writhe around in a shallow grave for the first several pages of her erotic novella.

That’s not how this works, Lucy! You can’t have your secret Net sex fiend character also be a sex fiend in meatspace and treat it like it’s a striking contrast! That’s like writing a character named Canicide who can be whomever he wants to be online: a guy who shoots dogs, a guy who poisons dogs, a guy who kills dogs with nunchucks, while in real life he’s — just Jeff Dogmurder, part-time dog euthanasia technician.

If you’re worried that this is a bit leading up to a character cutting a dog in half, rest easy. There is No Dog Murder in This Novel (A Novel of Dog Murder). What there is, is a sallow, greasy world of omnipresent sexual violence.

Lucita is arguably our “protagonist,” if only because she’s too busy to indulge in murderfucking hookers. She’s on some kind of mission to find the missing vampire Jan Pieterzoon. Presumably he was an important figure in the source material, because the book makes him into essentially an undead MacGuffin. If you don’t know Vampire lore, the book ends up reading like the LiveJournal recap of a roleplay session by the world’s darkest Cookie Monster pajama pants girl.

Everyone is obsessed with sex in this book. You know how in Pokemon games, nobody can have a conversation without bringing up Pokemon? It’s like that, except with fucking. I’m pressing A to talk to an elderly man and a text box is showing up that reads, “Did you know? A penis can go inside a lot of places!” For creatures who don’t get any pleasure out of sex, vampires talk about it a lot.

Ok, I get that vampires are inhuman monsters and I also know that Clan Giovanni was canonically ahead of the game on the incest craze. But just logistically, what does fucking on top of the Washington Monument even look like? Now, the Lincoln Memorial? That’s a monument you could really bang out some undead family members on.

Taylor’s temporarily redeemed herself. The idea that vampires incorporate fucking into their Resident Evil-style puzzles is pretty solid. I can’t help but think that keeping the emergency escape key chained to your dick is maybe not the most expeditious choice, but I admire the theatrics.

Anyway, Lucita meets a vampire named Erasmus in the sewers while escaping from a burning building, and we get our first piece of art. Oh, did I not mention that this thing was illustrated? Thrill to a view of the inexplicably nude Lucita from the point of view of a sewer turd.

With Erasmus in the mix, I should mention that there are no fewer than a dozen characters in this 150 page novella, meaning nobody really has any kind of an arc and the book is mostly just putting the characters together in different combinations like smashing Barbies up against one another taint-first. And hey, it’s erotica! That’s fine! Or, I mean, it would be fine if every character wasn’t in a competition to be America’s most unlikeable sex criminal.

We’re introduced to David Vargas while he’s banging a chubby employee of the addiction facility he’s been sent to and imagining that it’s his sister. He is a less amiable Patrick Bateman who fakes orgasms because he is a cum wizard whose power is diminished whenever he releases his seed.

David is a singularly unpleasant character who would not be out of place on Twitter today. He’s got all the hallmarks of a modern male influencer: a bizarre fascination with “femboys,” polydrug abuse, and an obsession with mogging other men.

David’s thing is that wants revenge against his half-sister Becca for having him committed after he, uh, repeatedly raped her. His plan is as simple as it is elegant: go to her house and commit violent sex crimes. But when he arrives, something is amiss.

If they let you print pictures of blood-soaked vulvas in the dictionary, this would be the image for “understatement.”

Isabel and her associate, Sascha Vykos, have beaten David to the punch and killed his sister, a vampire hunter working with their priest father. Except they haven’t at all — they got her girlfriend by mistake, and poor David — who, again, arrived on the scene hoping to sexually assault and murder his sibling — is forced into an act which he somehow balks at.

I never thought I’d say this, but can I just write about Peachtree Carnivore again? Sure there was a lot of incest in that, but at least everyone was into it. And nobody was sticking it in a corpse, either. But hey, when an androgynous skinmonster tells you to give it to a headless body, well, that headless body starts to look pretty good in comparison.

Haha, get his ass! Vykos is a kind of vampire called a Tzimisce, who are masters of “fleshcrafting.” That sounds like the premise for a horror movie about an evil knitting circle, but it means that he can shape himself and others to look however he wants. Imagine you have the power to shift your appearance into anything you desire at any time. I think we all know what we’d go for.

Vykos looks like a sickly bondage Predator from the hit film Predator. Like this is the Predator that all the other ones fucking hate because it’s a little too into the skinning and beheading and all that stuff. Always talking about the delicious taste of fear on the air, running around with its hog and pierced titties fully out. Come on, man. You’re making us all look like creeps.

David, terrified of Vykos but excited at the prospect of immortality, enters into an apprenticeship in the trade of sick fuckery for credit towards vampirism. Meanwhile, his sister and father are hunting monsters and having normal conversations.

Maybe knowing that supernatural predators are real means that conversational decorum goes out the window. But if it’s me? Even if my dad and I are out on the streets slaying vampires, we’re not talking about who I’m boning down with.

In between the father-daughter conversations about boning and the Cronenbergian assault scenes, there is a plot building to a jaded, pointless climax. Kind of. Vykos takes over David’s father’s church and tries to convince his flock that it’s an angel. David crucifies and murders his father in hopes of getting to become a vampire himself, and everything seems like it’s going great for the two of them until Vykos’ past dalliances come back to haunt it.

Rapunzel claws her way out of her grave and rampages through the city in search of her love! “Toxic Hellbroth” would have been a better name for this book.

See, Vykos, this is why you don’t stick your dick/fangs/fleshcrafted appendages in crazy. I guess it’s sort of amusing — ironic, even — that Vykos is undone by being such a sadistic freak. But hold up. Midway through the book we get an explanation of how Rapunzel ended up in her predicament.

Fine. I guess. But remember, the guy she’s talking to, the one who orchestrates her murder and transformation into a vampire? It’s Vykos.

I want you to scroll up for a moment and refresh your memory on what Vykos looks like, then imagine it hunched over a 1990s PC in an office chair made out of living human flesh, cruising IRC for potential meatpuppets at 2 AM. It’s unbelievably stupid. If this book were written today, Vykos would be a mod looking for Discord kittens.

You can get away with a lot of goofy shit if your intended audience is cranking it. But the idea of jerking off to Eternal Hearts is like busting one out to Henry Kissinger — technically possible, and probably at least one person has done it, but I sure as fuck wouldn’t want to meet them. And without masturbation clouding the reader’s perception, it again becomes clear that Lucy Taylor just isn’t a great writer.

The whiskey bottle was calling to him. I mean, not literally calling. You guys get that, right? It’s just a normal bottle of whiskey, not a magic crooning bottle. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Yet in the World of Darkness, such things are all too real…

Or here, near the end of the book, David carries his father into the room with his half-sister.

But only pages later, he’s wandering around the catacombs and encounters his father seemingly for the first time.

Taylor really loves the needless parentheticals. Much as a whiskey bottle doesn’t literally call out to an alcoholic, it’s important to note that simply because a pubic mound is shaven on one occasion, does not mean that one can assume it is at all times.

Does that say “meaty vulval folds?” Fuck. That’s my limit, I’m tapping out. But believe it or not, Eternal Hearts kind of does have a happy ending. David betrays Vykos and helps Lucita fight him off, then asks her to make him a vampire. And she does, albeit through delegation.

David’s a vampire alright, but he’s a buttplug vampire.

Meanwhile, David’s sister Becca gets to be the cool hot kind of vampire with Pieterzoon, who spent the whole book trapped in an underground aquarium.

Holy shit, she did it! Lucy Taylor wrote a sex scene where both partners were at least sort of into it, where neither one was doing it to manipulate the other, and where nobody compares the sex act to a giant, nearly hairless spider!

Well, hey, as vampire Meat Loaf would say, “two out of three ain’t bad. My new vampire name is Meaty Vulval Loaf.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neku104, who is capable of performing the physical act by redirecting blood to the appropriate pieces of anatomy, but gains no particular pleasure from sponsoring it.