Jason Pettus's Reviews > Their Human Vessel

2023 reads, #8. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is one of a handful now of books I've read in what's called the "fated mate" subgenre; that's when a paranormal creature such as a werewolf or space alien is not only attracted to our story's female lead character (or FLC), but is literally compelled biologically by something in their paranormal makeup to mate with her no matter what they rationally think of the situation, usually explained away with some vague term like "werewolf DNA" or "alien blood." In the case of the "Twilight" books that first made this trope famous (called "imprinting" in those novels), this uncontrollable compulsion to mate falls more on the emotional and romantic side of things, so that werewolves suddenly find themselves with the irresistible urge to buy their girlfriend a teddy bear or wash her hair in the bathtub; but in Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, this compulsion is much more darkly sexual in nature, a story concerning the first human woman to ever visit a planet full of male-exclusive eight-foot-tall blue-skinned devil-looking space aliens, whose compulsion to breed is so strong that even after getting one whiff of her scent from hundreds of feet away, our male lead character (MLC) immediately has a groaning flood of an orgasm that splashes right on the ground in front of him without him ever touching his penis, which should give you a good idea of what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about one of these characters being "biologically compelled to breed." (Don't worry, though -- at one point he does wash her hair in a local pond, now still making it 100% of every romance or women's erotica novel I've ever read that has featured a scene of the MLC washing the FLC's hair in a body of water in one way or another. You ladies and your obsession with having your hair washed by your boyfriend, I swear, I just don't get it.)

Essentially this genre provides a cleaned-up, woman-friendly means of engaging in the very dark but surprisingly common fantasy many women have about being gangbang raped, which in fact is so common that there's at least three different subgenres within romance devoted to the subject, not just these "fated mate" stories but also "reverse harem" ones (in which the FLC is more aggressive about the subject and actually loves having all these hunky dumb men at her beck and call), as well as "why choose" stories (in which each of the men actually act like a traditional romantic partner, essentially letting the FLC have three or four or five monogamous boyfriends all at once [well, the men are all monogamous, anyway], with all the guys being remarkably cool about the fact that she has four other boyfriends, justified in a way usually baked right into the book's gimmicky subject). And I have to admit, it's an extremely clever way to tell such a story, because the female readers get to both have their cake and eat it too; for if you wrote a book about just some normal human male who suffered from uncontrollable sexual urges, and who felt compelled to sometimes grab the nearest female, hold her down, then breed with her to completion, that guy would just be some gross rapist Harvey Weinstein creep, and take it from me, ain't no woman out there in existence looking for a romance novel in which Harvey Weinstein is the MLC. By making it a special part of a paranormal character's fictional biology, though, this allows the character himself to still be the kind of boyfriend women fantasize about -- thoughtful, tender, respectful, caring -- who just happens to get overwhelmed by by the "whateverian" in his bloodstream that once every blood moon compels him to insert his horse-sized dick (they're always horse-sized dicks) into his "designated seed receptacle" (the FLC, often in some kind of collar-focused light bondage gear by now) until the deed has been finished, as the puny human mewls and squirms under his rock-hard body, both loving and protesting every moment of it. Then, back to washing her hair in the bathtub!

Let's be clear, a big part of what makes Their Human Vessel so enjoyable is that it's simply a great science-fiction novel to begin with, full stop, no matter what other genre might be attached to it, with Bequin clearly having the kind of mastery over SF's tropes that comes with undoubtedly being a con-going fan herself; the universe-building here is solid, expansive, believable and clever, the dialogue Peak TV-level (or, you know, Joss Whedon-level at least), the characters complex and easy to root for. But sister, then add the bright blue horse cocks and the space alien gangbangs, and I luuuuuuuurved it, because this is exactly the kind of dark, outre, go-for-it prurience I myself like in erotic stories, as someone now in his 50s and who has been exploring sexuality in a complex and nuanced way for over 30 years now. What makes this book great is that Bequin simply doesn't hold back here, like so many women's erotica authors do when push finally comes to shove at their manuscript's most graphic moments; here, our FLC is pinned down and fucked before she can even get out a question about what's happening, much less a protest, over and over and over by multiple characters in multiple situations throughout the entire book, in an unending fashion without breaks needed since the unique DNA of the horse-dicked aliens make them ready to go again mere seconds after their previous orgasm, because of course it does, of course.

And, in perhaps the most clever detail of all, part of Bequin's mythos here is that small amounts of the aliens' sperm can literally reverse aging and kill cancer in humans (the big secret behind this planet, that a British East India-type private company has enslaved the entire alien population and hooked them up to dick-milking machines, to sell the sperm as a medical pill back on Earth), but large amounts of sperm will literally start turning a human into one of the aliens themselves; so every time our short-haired, small-breasted, nerdy, reader stand-in-feeling FLC takes another massive load from the three remaining non-enslaved space aliens left on the planet, in the unending aggressive gangbangs they perpetrate on her over and over in their Na'vi-looking glowing-plant-filled underground pond cavern oases, the more those loads start changing her body to be more ready to endlessly take on these massive gangbangs over and over, as her bluish skin toughens and her sex drive goes up and she understands how it can be to deeply love three men at the same time with no guilt or shame. Or, er, three eight-foot-tall blue space aliens with horse cocks, I mean.

I gotta plainly say, I loved this book, women's erotica done really right, which perfectly treads that invisible line between silly and legitimately hot. I can see that this author also has a whole series in the subgenre known as "omegaverse," which I have a strong interest in exploring (the very first romance manuscript I was ever offered as a freelancer, in fact, was an omegaverse story, which sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole a full six months ago or so, which has made me curious about the genre ever since). So I may actually take that one on next, and if it's good then go straight to the group of other omegaverse novels I recently downloaded to my Kindle, when going to a promotional website recently and downloading 30 titles all at once, split up among such subgenres as Regency, contemporary, Christian, beach, cyberpunk, "knotted" (but whew, more on that another day), cozy mystery, urban fantasy, Irish small town, mafia, and...that's it. No, wait, and Tolkien "high fantasy." That's it -- that covers the 30 romance and women's erotica titles currently on my Kindle. Like, five of those are omegaverse novels, so I may or may not hop straight to those after reading Bequin's Wounded Omega, we'll see. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who needs something rather intense to really "enjoy yourself" as a reader (I think you know what I mean), this'll be just your ticket, a story that needs some disbelief suspended but that by doing so can really suck you in as a good old-fashioned very dirty story. ...With, you know, blue-skinned horse dicks, buyer beware.