Cliched erotica all bang but no bite

Pleasure Bound by Susan Swann X-Libris, $85 It was so exciting I could hardly stay awake. As erotic thrills go, Pleasure Bound moves the boredometer needle into the red.

X-Libris, an imprint of publisher Little, Brown, offers x-rated fiction for women, written by women - or at least, writers using women's names.

But in Susan Swann's collection of 13 short stories enclosed in a symbolically hot pink cover, she manages to bring together some of the most tired, cliched formulae imaginable, basing her 'plots' on the type of dreary stereotyped fantasies it is disappointing to see produced by a woman.

Girls like a spanking; girls like a man in uniform; girls secretly yearn to be dominated - it is all here in its politically incorrect and monumentally boring glory.

Here we have the woman who walks through an old-fashioned mirror and into a boudoir where the ideal lover awaits her, and the lesbian who sleeps alone in a haunted house where the sexy female ghost gives her a night to remember.

And, in Julia's Burning, Swann brings us three cliches in one - fireman twins who turn up to put out Julia's fire - in her bedroom - and stay to help her cool off with the aid of a smacked bottom.