'Awakening' by Kitty Thomas

Received from the Author

From the BLURB:

Nerina has lived all her life as a mermaid, fascinated by humans and land but also repulsed by sex and unable to understand love. Her curiosity gets her captured by a human male intent on awakening her lust and turning her human. But Nerina doesn’t believe the legend is real and fears Kyros will kill her when he learns she can’t transform.

Nerina, a beautiful mermaid, has been caught. Tangled in a net and exposed to the lascivious gazes of fishermen – she is at their mercy, and could end up as a delicacy on their banquet table, or subjected to their monstrous human rutting.

But then the captain arrives – a dark and beautiful man called Kyros. He has been fascinated by sea nymphs, sirens and mermaids for a long time … and has often wondered what he would do if he ever caught one.

Now that Nerina is in his clutches, he intends to replace her fin with feet and introduce her to mankind’s baser pleasures.

‘Awakening’ is the new novella from dark literary erotica author, Kitty Thomas.
I love Kitty Thomas. Everything she writes is a delightfully dark delicacy and ‘Awakening’ is more of the same.

In the past, Thomas has written to the extremes of BDSM and fetishism. From captive/torturer plots to an island community dedicated to the master/slave dynamic. By comparison, ‘Awakening’ is tame-Kitty. The 21,500-word novella is sort of Kitty-lite, and would be a great ‘beginners’ novel for those who want to dip their toes in the pool of darker erotica.

‘Awakening’ definitely leans toward the more ‘literary’ end of Thomas’s usual literary-erotica genre. The novella is based around the idea of transformation and contradiction – mermaid to human, sea to land, innocence to guiltiness. Thomas explores these concepts through the ancient mythology of mermaids, who are in themselves a contradiction. On the one hand they are sexless – fins instead of genitalia. Yet, sea nymphs and sirens have been written as lurers of men to their watery graves.

With the character of Nerina, Thomas takes the traditional mermaid legend and twists it to romance and lust. The dastardly captain, Kyros, decides to force a human metamorphosis on the sea nymph Nerina and have his carnal way with her.

I knew Kyros was watching me, but I didn’t care. Let the human watch the only real pleasure he could ever give me. I wondered if he would become jealous of the water, how it made me come to life and caused bliss to spread across my features. Bliss he would never be capable of with his own hands. I was sure of it.

‘Awakening’ is less about domination than Thomas’s other works, as it has a far more romantic bent, as both Nerina and Kyros learn something about themselves with her transformation;

I sobbed into his mouth because I was afraid he was right. I feared he was awakening me from a long slumber caused by all my years living deep in the ocean, where maybe we didn’t dream because it was all a dream down there. Everything from my time in the sea somehow felt unreal and fuzzy in his arms. I couldn’t think with his mouth moving over mine like that. The way he held me. His possessive, proprietary kiss.

Kitty Thomas has done it again. She takes what would otherwise be an uncomfortable and squirm-inducing idea and crafts it into a beautiful tale of human dynamics and lust, exploring the many facets of want and craving. Divine.

5/5