"Caleb Woke Up" - by McBacon

Why I love Caleb Woke Up actually owes, in part, to how much McBacon loves his breasts.

No, not his breasts. Unless he likes those too, to which I say, 'All the more power, friend! And is this chicken we're talking about, or..?'

Rather, the breasts in his excellently written, seductively crafted multi-chapter, 'harem fantasy' showpiece: a story, not unlike many a mind control tale, about a young inexperienced man who comes across an inconspicuous little trinket and -- oh, now he's ejaculating into the mouth of a cultured Chinese lady! How did that happen? Was it the inconspicuous trinket? No it can't be. That would be ridiculous.

They pro'lly just like his haircut.

The writing in Caleb Woke Up is sharp, it's efficient, and also goes into empathetic detail on the twisted perspectives of both our gullible protagonist and the females who are subjected to the whims of his new necklace, which effectively imprints upon them mischievously flavored compulsions to please and tease the main character by tethering them to his innate sexual need, and the repressed fantasies that reside in him. All, for the most part, without them even being aware of its work on them.

Caleb (aptly named) lives in a devout Christian household. Over the course of most of the story (which, ultimately, is a medium-length read, and no epic), he is simply attending a potluck dinner at his church with his family: his sister, Anna, and mother, Darcy. Both relatively conservative women, with, of course, great, hard-to-conserve chests. He has suggestive encounters with them, and more, as the story progresses.

The set-up is a natural vein of pulsing, erotic tension. People pigeonholed into values of stringent moral caliber, the contrast between a setting oriented around superficially proper conduct and the impending arrival of some reality-warping, corrosive, raw, animalistic ****; this has always been an ultimate touchstone in my own personal canvas. To get it right is tricky, but when accomplished, the result is always titillating, wrong, and fiendishly, perversely provocative.

And McBacon accomplishes this through an effective usage of perspective. He brings us into Caleb's shoes. He always seems to think and do what you'd imagine a boy like him to think and do (besides some plot-induced conveniences). The girls think and do what you'd imagine they'd do after their thinking was re-wired by a mind controlling amulet. The dialogue, the build-up, and the eventual climactic highs of each scene have all to do with McBacon's tact for succinct but creative and hungry erotica that is equal parts intelligent as it is preciously deviant. Almost juvenile, but never quite. And unflinchingly in love with the female body, particularly up top. You know, where the heart is.

In short, Caleb Woke Up is one of my favorites for painting a simple, yet comfortably paced and penned picture of a sexually repressed boy who acquires the power to bend all of the walking wet dreams and average pretty-faced teens around him to his subconscious will. That subconscious aspect, and the way the power effortlessly conjures rationalizations in the women's minds, and the cavernous but patient escalation his self-imposed situations undergo, evoke the feeling of some external, unfathomable **** turning these people into playthings, all while retaining a supposedly unchanged, sensible surface, and it's that deceptive dichotomy, synthesizing the playful with the serious, the impossible with the seemingly reasonable, that peregrinates the story's straightforward erotic skeleton.

But most of all, it is, in my personal, subjective, fair-to-be-wrong opinion, the best depiction of a young, sexually naive man pining for things he can't possibly have, suddenly having those things fall right into his lap, as supplied by the girls in his life, who, for all of that time, were just centered fantasies in his mind, now treating said personal fantasies as a sudden archetype to adopt in a life as real as raisin and as impossibly true as Facebook photo albums. It is one of my favorite portrayals of a character with long-held fetishes, longings, suddenly and bafflingly seeing them come to life, manifest before his own eyes, with a meticulous mental response colored by disbelief, excitement, and, of course, self-gratification. The ultimate case of "turning the tables."

There are plenty of stories which tackle this sort of framing; better ones, longer ones, and ones that are actually complete, unlike Caleb Woke Up. Some that may even be featured in this very catalog, which may even be claimed as another superlative gem. But when I read McBacon's story years ago, it struck a chord that never quite left. It is the kind of story that I had always would have liked to have written, earlier. Alas, it wouldn't have been as good as the Bacon's.