Match, Cinder & Spark | Matt’s Smut Vault

We love all kinds of books here at the Smut Vault: E-books, web hosted stories, tales of lust hastily scrawled on bathroom walls…we can find it all! But there’s just a certain something about holding a tangible copy in your hand that makes things feel a little more solid. This week’s Smut Vault contribution works best in the hard copy form as there’s a special format choice that makes it a little more unique than the rest. Excited? So are we! Let’s dig in before this one collects any more dust. It’s high time for a literal page turner!

Match, Cinder & Spark Volume II: More! by H.H. is a collection of short stories and long-form anecdotes on the sexual adventures of the author and his partner, Lola or “Lo.” Each story (of which there’s around a dozen), is an independent story or sexual observation of their lives together. The book informs us straight away that Lo is a nearly insatiable sexual being and sex is always at forefront of her mind. As you might expect, this leads to some interesting scenarios that seem fitting to journal into a work such as this. It’s not my place to say whether these stories actually happened or not, but there’s an interesting balance between realism and bat-shit crazy that leaves possibility open on either side.

The first such story I chose to examine was one of the couple’s trip to an ancient Monastery in Japan to intensively learn the ways of meditation and Buddhism. If you’re unaware, one of the big things at a place like a monastery is the voluntary denial of the pleasures of the flesh. Two months of celibacy were on the books for a couple that literally base their relationship around the sexy parts. What could possiblaie go wrong? Somewhere between the masturbating on the airplane, the masturbating in the communal shower, to the pseudo bukkake that released the two months of sexual denial for every male pilgrim on this zen journey we see that Lo is the sort of woman that always gets what she wants, come hell or high water. The story is written in a verbose tone leaving no stone unturned through its detailed explanation. But if the words don’t do it for you…maybe the pictures will?

What will probably sell this book from a particular standpoint is that it is chock FULL of photos of the pair serving as story illustrations. There’s a lot of care being put into this, and the use of their own sexual avatars on display for the entire world shows that maybe there’s a bit of truth to these far out sexual exploits being put to paper. That being said, this sort of style won’t be for everyone. My wife and I enjoy erotica as a “theater of the mind” and generally don’t involve our own sexual feels into the proceedings. For us, we don’t feel the book is meant for our unique style of appreciation…but maybe a more swinging bachelor will have a different idea…

<picks up the TehBen hotline>

NELSONNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When Matt set out to give me this book, he called it a “gift”. As it turns out, some gifts are, in fact, curses. That is because I now have physical, tangible proof of the type of material I review online here. Digital copies of books can be purged and locked away from prying eyes, but if I die in a car accident tomorrow, what will my mourning family think when they discover this? At any rate, I suppose that awkward explanation can be left to Matthew; payback from beyond the hypothetical grave, bitch.

So I chose to read the same two short stories Matt did, but then chose to explore a little more. I scanned the Table of Contents page and found “The Student Body”. Alright, no sex studies, and no desecrating temples, just a normal run-of-the-mill Teacher/student affair. You can likely find a shortcut for that sort of thing on PornHub, so let’s give it a read.

This short story is a sort of odd mash-up of two narratives, like putting the prequel and the original in the same movie. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I will say that I appreciate that it diverges from the normal “detention” or “after school tutoring session where you use the Prof’s D to get A’s” format. However, taking the other two stories also into account, I’m disappointed in how one-dimensional Lola is. There’s brief snippets in this Student Body piece that almost provide depth to her character outside of being a nymphomaniac cumslut, but like characters in nearly every tv show, her development gets reset at the beginning of the next episode. 

I do think the amateur style photographs used in the book are an interesting touch, and there’s potential there. Humans are, by nature, visual animals, and I think that if used well, they could significantly improve the reader’s experience. There seems to be a slight disconnect here between some of the images, and the text that goes with them. 

Verdict: Match, Cinder & Spark Volume II: More! by H.H. is an earnest expression of a couple’s sexual energy…and that energy contains the white hot passion of one thousand suns. Each individual story along with its accompanying pictures is equal parts fun and sexy, but to attempt to mentally splice the smut with the real life antics of this power couple would be a fool’s errand. If you and/or your partner have a wild sexual side you’d like to explore on paper, to explore your wildest fantasies in the comfort of your own bedroom, you’d be doing yourself a favor by starting with this dynamic duo.

Special Thanks to H.H. for providing a review copy of Match, Cinder & Spark to TehBen.com All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Author’s Blog: http://mysexlifewithlola.com/
Purchase Link: Lulu.com