Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: The Secret of the Pink Ray
AUTHOR: Maya Anders
PUBLISHER: JMS Books
LENGTH: 46 pages
RELEASE DATE: August 25, 2018
BLURB:
It’s 1939 and an evil mastermind is on the loose in New York City, armed with a giant death ray. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with a transatlantic war threatening to break out at any moment.
Fortunately help is at hand in the form of a talented and sexy team of lesbian crime fighters led by Tiffany Hazard, A.K.A. the Bronze Goddess, and her erudite sidekick Kimmerleigh Fox, the Sapphic Super-Scientist.
Add in sword-wielding vigilante Lady Blade, alias mild-mannered researcher Suki Suzuki, and glamorous British movie star Emma Storm, who just happens to be a secret agent with a license to kill.
The quartet is hot on the trail of the enemy … when they’re not engaged in red-hot sex. If the old-time pulp magazines had lesbian heroines, this is what they would have been like!
REVIEW:
If you mixed Quentin Tarantino heroines, Rob Liefeld comic art, and lesbian sexploitation films, you’d get something like this short story. And as in all of those listed works, there’s a lot of bad with the good.
The humor really worked for me, and I wish there was more of it. The idea that “lesbian crime fighters” are just a known entity in 1939 is hilarious. Out of all the public threats of that time period, lesbians still seem to top the list, which is wonderfully and absurdly American. The skimpy outfits and constant nudity are cringe-worthy, but they provide plenty of comic relief. I mean, being completely naked aside from a sword belt just sounds dangerous, but it’s a fun image.
The femme fatale tropes are all spot-on—the voluptuous silver-screen vixen, the Amazonian superhero, the quirky sidekick, the Asian assassin. They take all of those stereotypes we’ve been seeing for years and amp it by a thousand. They’re familiarly offensive, but then they go ahead and kill the Nazis, smash the patriarchy, and pass the Bechdel Test. This is in no way a progressive work, but it’s certainly tongue-in-cheek.
The sex scenes are…awful. Truly awful, and not even in a “so bad it’s good” way. Despite the author being apparently female, there’s no comprehension of female sexuality or body mechanics. Vaginas don’t have hair, scissoring doesn’t work like that, and consent is key, no matter what. I never want to hear female genitalia described as “meaty” ever again. And the exact diameter of an areola is never pertinent information, no matter how much any particular reader adores boobs.
If you’re going to write exploitation in this day and age, I think it needs to parody the genre as well as celebrate it. It needs to be intelligently stupid, so to speak. You can have your silly, slapstick exploitation romp while still making modern readers smile. Most of this book made me cringe rather than laugh. Jokes are passed up for panties being sliced off with a sword. Satire is overlooked for an exploding head. I wanted more historical elements, more weird science, more ladies working together doing awesome things. Instead, this is a skeleton of a work—one that could be awesome, but consistently falls flat.
This is obviously a work by an author who appreciates schlock genres of all kinds. She knows it’s absurd, and that’s entirely the point. But there’s still plenty that could’ve been improved upon to make it a smarter, funnier, sexier, and more memorable story.
RATING: 
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