Human Dollification: Turned into a Love Doll by Sara James

Regular benders of the bookshelf will remember very well the week we dedicated to female masking not so long ago. It was a ton of fun, with some great reads that really opened my eyes to a new facet of transgender expression. It's also a sub-genre of transgender fiction that introduced me to a more fetish-oriented offshoot, that of human dollification.

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We begin our second day of human dollification with one of the first stories to have caught my eye, and one of the first authors to so gleefully agreed to feed the fetish.

Turned into a Love Doll is actually a series of three tales by Sara James, a serialized story that takes one innocent young man through the life of a living blow-up doll. It all begins when he comes home from a wild birthday party, sexually frustrated from a night of no-touching at the strip club, and left with the blow-up love doll as a gag gift. He decides to blow it up, just to see what it looks like, and that's when things start getting strange.

I absolutely loved the idea of passing your own essence into a cursed blow up love doll as you blow it up. It's really quite clever the way Sara slowly alters our perception of what's happening with tiny, almost random, visual clues. With each breath, Harry becomes weaker, more disoriented, and confused as to who and what he is. When she suddenly shifts his gender in mid-sentence, you almost have to go back to reread what just happened. In addition, there's a very nice twist to it all, with the doll only being capable of speech and movement if fully inflated. Otherwise, he's left as a helpless, partially inflated mass of latex and rubber that can still be used, but which transmits no sensation to him.

Sara does more than just play with the sex life of a blow up love doll, however. Yes, this is an erotic transgender tale, but it's also one of supernatural horror. She never lets us get comfortable for long before challenging us to really get into the fantasy. I'm talking about details like the cardboard box scraping against open eyelids, feeling limp and hollow when partially inflated, of the rubbery squelch of unlubricated sex. She forces us to confront not just the horror of having your life stolen, but the terror of being packed away in a dark box for months at a time, cut off from all stimulation. Harry becomes nothing more a cheap toy in a disposable society, so entirely dependent on others that he worships a cum-covered finger forced into his rubber mouth. The final fantastic that explains the magic of the love doll is superb, and the confusion is creates is entire fitting. It all ends on a very dark, very horrific note, but I love the commitment to the reality of being a doll.

Reviewed by Sally