You Don't Want This

by Kristin Garth

You Don't Want This collection of short stories on topless dancers, ghosts, small town punk rock bars, transactional relationships, ghostings, strip clubs, womanchildishness, erotic horror, bad choices, lust, age play, dd/lg, fuckboys, bisexuality, hauntings, fuckboys, sadists, sociopathy, surviving abuse, megalomania, reality tv addiction, sex addiction, drug addiction, corruption kink, adultery, tyranny, gargoyles, passivity, suicidal despair, asexuality, taphephelia, sex club auctions, polyamory, harassment and kink.  But if you do, it exists in these 150 pages exploring the horrors and hedonism of sexual exploration, expression, repression and evolution, erotic horrors and hauntings.

162 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2022

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You don't want this". Yes I do, yes I do. It's taken me awhile to process Kristin Garth's writing style as it's vastly different from the madding crowd of authors out there. I'm getting a hybrid of tea party doll commercial dairies balanced with Story of O fetish erotica. It's a style that's unsettling in places, but perhaps its unique voice is what makes it so unsettling.

Also contains Kristin's novella The Meadow as a bonus.

[Nick Stika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool collection of short stories about a whole bunch of things! I'd been following Kristin Garth on Instagram for some time and this is the first book I've read. I will be getting more! Great writer!

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristin Garth’s short story collection You Don’t Want This is a capillary-bursting, dopamine-cresting, psychosexual rush with a hefty side order of darkness. The majority of these stories revolve around a woman’s sexual experiences whether as a fully participating subject or as a sexual object taking in her surroundings and learning about the landscape of men’s and women’s desires. Those who have read Kristin Garth’s rapidly multiplying collections of poetry will recognize the heavily erotic subject matter but the form it is delivered in is slightly different and therefore there are slightly different shades of consciousness. That being said, the sonnet form, with combinations of internal rhyming patterns Garth has notoriously claimed as her own territory, does often survive in the prose of the stories, like a waltzing partner directing the reader to keep moving in time, keep stepping and whirling to a formal beat.

The title story, “You Don’t Want This,” nicely sets the stage for the secret world of transactions, delineations, understandings, and rules which populate the collection. A new, barely legal exotic dancer faces off with a customer in a strip club who dismisses her, saying he doesn’t want her because of her dangerously young age. As things happen she winds up giving him a little enticement in a lap dance before mastering him, cutting him off midway, and walking away with all of the power. The ending of the story as the dancer goes backstage to adjust herself is too much of an uppercut not to repeat: “I fix my braids and head out to find another you. I will be busy all night because you are everywhere. None of you want this. All of you are liars.”

The negotiations over power—who gets it, how it is taken or given, how it is enacted, what that differential means—gives the collection a strong intoxicating flavor of BDSM liqueur perfect for voyeurs. Dangerous encounters are best, if not for the characters, at least for the sake of fiction, it seems. Again and again the stories explore moments of sexual activation where control is lost—or transformed.

(Mild spoilers follow in this paragraph; if you are really curious about the predicaments and plot arrangements of Garth’s stories here, skip this paragraph and buy the book with no regrets.) Stories like “14 and Kneeling” and “Gynecology, Khakis, & Videotape” offer brief glimpses of young girls at crucial turning points and moments of what can only be called degradation. They are very difficult to read and contain bitter, harrowing, well-crafted endings that elevate them above being mere horror stories. “The Balletomane” is a welcome flash of humor as the director of an expensive ballet class has to contend with what is revealed by tardy payers. “Another Day at the Office” involves a woman and her friend invited to a hotel by an aging rockstar for whom such dalliances are commonplace, but not for the two women: sex can carve a vast gulf between its participants. In “You’re Just His Type” a young woman sitting in on a murder trial for a college course exchanges glimpses with the rapist-murderer on trial and becomes implicated in an unbearably intimate situation with him, with a shall we say “killer” ending.

It is not too hard to guess that Garth has learned from her prolific sonnet-writing how to tie a bow at the end of a narrative, how to give the material a final exquisite wriggle to expand the dimensions of understanding, how to peel away barriers to the revelation of truth. I am always won over by endings, the way they leave you hanging in mid-air with nothing to grab onto, and these endings were my favorite parts of reading the stories, some of which were very intense and had unpleasant themes. The final story of the collection is a novella called “The Meadow” and featured a sustained, vivid glimpse into the hermetic world of doms and subs. The interactions between the characters and the suspense was clever enough to keep me reading, even as the dire straits they were facing became more hellacious. The ending was satisfying, uplifting, and carried an important lesson for those of us who do not—at least consciously—inhabit such worlds of power and control and sexual transaction. For as arcane and specialized as the world of BDSM may seem, it might bear uncanny resemblances to the world of cloaked transactions and power plays the rest of us inhabit, without the reward of a clear sexual charge.

But is the book hot? Will it get you off? Under Garth’s management, the descriptions of the action are blistering and original and, not that I read a lot of erotic fiction, would seem to put other more tepid writers to shame. I’ve been watching Kristin Garth for a few years and can only say it’s heartening and inspiring to see her continue on her literary path and winning the game.

[Paige Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose as pretty and combustible as crackle polish, emotion as unmistakable as a nymph’s bare silhouette in a sundress. So much promise, lust, psychology, and internal conflict pressed into each story. Evolved Lolita kinks and confidence, a stripper’s articulation of the sexes, a sprinkle of 2nd person POV (my fav for it’s often reserved by the most masterful).

A true and even mixing of girlhood: pigtail ribbons, self-starvation, coveting and being coveted. Refrains often tweaked so only grow more powerful. Sonnets interlaced like stiletto ribbon. Stories from the perspectives of Dom Daddies and good girls, possible schizophrenics and crushing stenographers, Victorian cult leaders and sex-trafficked girls.

“You’re Just His Type” is my favorite with its sexy danger and sweet boy’s sorrow. Every time you reread, you unearth a world more, especially with “95 in Queens.” “Whilst” reminds me of Rasputina’s song “Bring Back the Egg Unbroken (The King),” and the story “Smile” of all Melanie Martinez’s discography. “Obsolescence” is the penultimate story (and likewise favorite) w/ a subtlety sexy businessman character who won’t cave to fake male feminists. It’s a nice encapsulation of how responsibility, sexuality, and other dabblings meddle with feelings towards one another.

[Lord Stabdagger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This unasuming little book is packed with explosive erotica that'll have you bursting out of your pants like the Incredible Hulk down the strip club!!
And that's just on the first story!!
If you want a book you can refer to ad the bible of forbidden erotica, THIS IS IT!
This book is so hot it'll soon be captured by the Vatican! So grap your copy NOW!!!
😃🐺🎩 xxx

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is remarkable. I loved every page.