Engines of Desire

Tales of Love & Other Horrors

By: Livia Llewellyn

Narrated by: Christy Lynn

Death and pleasure. Freud's Todestrieb, his statement that "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards.... The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron states, "Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain."

An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a listener's sensibilities, their fears and desires.

©2011 Livia Llewellyn (P)2013 Livia Llewellyn

Decent writing hindered by a bland performance.

Llewellyn's writing is good, but it needs to be read by someone with a better grasp of performative narration. Like Lovecraft, Llewellyn doesn't overindulge in dialogue. Lynn does well enough in the sparce areas where the characters are actually speaking, but her tone during the narrative is dull, bordering on monotony. None of the emotions come through. Which is a shame because the writing is certainly not devoid of them.

Dark Stories, Not Awesome Narrator

Lewellyn's fiction is, as many have noted, a kind of nihilistic erotica where sex and the emptiness of death commingle in truly disturbing ways. Great stuff. Unfortunately, the narrator has a way of making all the dialogue sound either whiny or cartoonish, and the repetitive rhythm of the reading does no justice to the horror of the tales, instead making them seem perfunctory.

Decent performance, drab and dull stories

I'm not even sure what the point of the stories was supposed to be. The narrator did as much as could reasonably be expected to bring the characters to life, but they were so lifeless to start with they fall flat anyway.

Horrible narration

I wanted to like this more but the narration was so flat and awful. The cadence and emotions were so detached from the story I’m not convinced it wasn’t AI.

Couldn't finish it

I almost always finish my purchases but could not get through this one. The writing seemed amateur, like written by a freshman creative writing class. The second story was so bad, I kept skipping ahead. The sex scenes played like old seventies porn. And I did not care for the reader who sounded like the old late night TV ads for phone sex numbers. And her vocal fry was so bad, almost unlistenable. To women readers, please clean up your vocal fry before publishing an audio book. This is the second book I've experienced with this problem, the other one being The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.