The Price on Her Head by Suzanne Clay: Monster Fucker #3

Okay, this review is easily going to be the most out-there thing that I’ve done on this blog,and honestly it might keep that title for a good while. Agender demon sex was pretty different, but I don’t think anyone is ready for minotaur tiddies. Certainly not these ones.

As near as I can gather by reading Goodreads reviews and such, Morning Glory Milking Farm seemingly gained way more attention than most bovine lovin’ romance. The genre existed prior, because “man with cow head” is just unbearably fuckin’ sexy, don’t you think?(?) The boost in attention is probably in equal measure due to “wtf” reads and genuine interest, but it’s unclear if anyone was yet prepared for the things seen in The Price on Her Head, the second Monstrous Desires novella by Suzanne Clay. I sure as fuck wasn’t. Was this inspired at all by the surprise hit of Morning Glory? A need for popular romance to be more fuckin’ gay? Possibly. Minotaurs are also a pretty common mainstay, so to a degree it’s not surprising.

On some level, I will be making mountains out of molehills with Clay’s Queer Minotaur Sextravaganza(in itself an exaggeration). On some level, it’s tame and really not even that spicy; of the 120 pages, maybe like 30-40 are sexy? But on another level, it is one of the most eclectic mixtures of themes, tropes and fetishes I have ever witnessed in my young life. I am gazing into the abyss, and this is the abyss staring back. In the form of monster porn.

You know the classic Greek myth of the Minotaur of Crete? Labyrinth and all? That’s where we’re at. It’s set in the typical medieval, dark age setting, but the king has required sacrifices of young children to the monster of the labyrinth, in order to keep pestilence at bay and such shit. So meet Myrine, who has a very ill son in dire need of expensive medical treatment. The solution? News has gone ‘round that the minotaur has escaped the king’s labyrinth, and he’s put out a bounty. Free money for killing a monster? Sounds legit.

Nothing is ever that simple though, and once Myrine actually tracks down the critter, she ends up stumbling into a set trap like an idiot. Peak huntress ability, everyone. She wakes up hanging from a tree with a busted foot, staring into the eyes of the minotaur.

As it turns out, the minotaur’s name is Eleonora and she(how do you tell minotaur genders? They all seem to have horns, so...) is actually quite courteous and reasonable lady. Instead of horrifically goring our huntress, she simply cuts her down, indicating that the loop-noose was meant for small animals, catching food. Neat! It’s not like Myrine can go anywhere on a shattered ankle though, and so she ends up sharing a cave for the night with this creature, even though her stated mission is to kill her, lmao.

I will now quote the text directly, because there is no way I could do it justice myself;

The creature tilted its head to the side. Its massive curved horns gleamed in the traces of light cutting through the trees. Its face was a strange combination of human and cow, with the light eyes front-facing similar to a predator and a flat, animal snout twitching as it smelled the air. But beneath the snout was unmistakably a pair of human lips, oddly full.

To put it bluntly, I don’t have words for this, or the brain capacity to even picture this. I would imagine this is what it feels like to have aphantasia. I can’t be the only one to have trouble picturing this, can I? Bovines have long, sort of dog-like heads, and human heads are pretty round... so where does the structurally integral cow snout make it into the otherwise human face? Is it just the funny cow nose slapped into the middle of a human face? That aside, this is more or less your regular minotaur – upright, with cow-like legs and hooves, a humanoid but furry torso and... that head.

Stepping back from that for a moment, The Price On Her Head is basically a queer twist on the literally ancient myth. The queen has a hot night of passion with a bull of some form, which is epic, and birthed a minotaur child! On its own that would be SHAMEFUL enough for the poor king... damn, she went to a bull. My man is literally the cuck to a bull, which is hilarious. But in addition to giving birth to a human-cow hybrid, the queen has also given birth to a trans lesbian minotaur.

My eyebrows left my face entirely when I saw the tags for this one. On its own, a sapphic t4t would be worthy of note, because there are like... checks notes maybe four of those that I know of? But Clay also felt the need to spice it up and make it a monster romance. On its face, this should be something I’m 200% game for. I luv me representation in sapphic lit, and I myself am at least casually interested in monster romances. There are two angles to tackle this from, then.

On the one hand, it can serve as a sort of queer commentary about how your average cishet normie would rather just lock us up and away than deal with us existing. This is both sad and true, although it’s not super deeply explored here. I guess generally, I feel like the monster romances so far are missing great opportunities for queer issues discussion in their text. I know that if you're reading this, you might have just sighed heavily, and you're right to! I often get sick of Shoulder Check* issues as well! That's kind of the point, though; my feeling is that the disconnect inherent in the fantasy and/or sci-fi setting of most monster romance makes it the perfect candidate for sharp metaphors and discussion about bigotry and such, without all the 'phobia stinging quite as badly as say, Light From Uncommon Stars does. A safe space for that kind of discussion, in terms of literature. The outcast, societally shunned monsters are all generally queer in these things; anything to say about that? But no, overall queerness is just natural in most of these, which is fine but again I feel a missed opportunity. Not that authors are required to have srsface discussions about bigotry, but given the text I feel it could work. The only real reason I mention this here is because The Price On Her Head is the one and only of the three I’ve read so far that touches on the issue. Even then, though, the king seems more bothered by the cowface than he does the trans gayness of the situation. On that level, minotaur sex overshadows commentary.

And GOLLY, why wouldn’t it? It’s also wholly possible that serious discussion about bigotry might clash when your novel features flawless passages like this;

This was no human, and Myrine’s body didn’t care. There was a keen, intelligent mind beneath those horns – sapient sentience. There was no shame in the sudden lust that washed over her from the feel of someone so intimately curved against her body.

Must be handy for the monster du jour that every human who encounters them is a passionate monster fucker. Side effect of the genre, I guess. Perhaps the idea is that, were they open to it, EVERYONE in this universe would in fact be a monster fucker? Or Myrine is just special that way. Really into fur.

You know, there is a brief passage in this thing that mentions Eleonora’s tongue trailing up something, and so I stopped and asked myself, What kind of tongue does a minotaur have? There are two possibilities, in my mind – since Eleonora has a mostly human head but a big cow snout, that there is a real-ass cow tongue, full sized and slick, hanging out. Does that also imply the presence of cow teeth...? The other is that her tongue is cow-sized but human in texture, which is kind of equally horrifying. Clay does specify that she has a human-ish mouth, so the intent is probably for a normal human tongue, but I got a lot of mileage from freaking out otherwise-enthusiastic monster fuckers with this question. Errybody gangsta to fuck a minotaur till they gotta find out what dat tongue and what it do.

This is the first monster romance I’ve personally read—because shut up, het romance is a state-sponsored psyop—that actually addresses the societal implications of fucking a minotaur or any other kind of monster. In Nad’s case, she and her swamp monster are content to live privately in a cabin in the swamp, like a bizarro version of Victorian English lesbians. Annabel’s story does briefly consider that she might have to tell her flatmate why there were demon sex noises coming from her room last night, but it’s not addressed on page. Myrine, though, spends a fair amount of time angsting away with Eleonora about how unfair it is that she cannot simply walk home, hand-in-hand(are minotaur hands furry?) with her new bovine lover. How people would wrinkle their brow and stare at her in confusion if she said “I fuck a minotaur and I’m proud of it”. Which, frankly, follow your dreams. It takes the pair of them about three days of cave-bound mutual masturbation—that was a new tag—to decide that actually, fuck this. There are cities less drowning in superstition and prejudice, and they’re both sure that Myrine’s kid won’t mind.

And so, they make off toward greener pastures(do minotaurs still like eating grass cow style?). The plan is for Eleonora to chop off her horns(if there’s a god, they’re a cruel fuck) for Myrine to present to the king as proof of her catch, so that she can get the gold and cure her son. She does, and thankfully the housekeeper and son both don’t mind that mum is now in whirlwind love with a ten foot tall minotaur.

I wasn’t that hot on this one. Minotaur hormones? Tongues? Does she make cow grunts when she nuts? FUR? So many questions. The minotaur thing kept getting in the way of the plot, for me, which might have been the intent. Minotaur smut. I discussed this one with my wife, and the conclusion we came to was this: A jet-black, twelve-foot androgynous demon or a sharp-fanged, branch-fingered, pale green swamp spirit is something that has no real analogue in life. No living being greatly resembles either of those, and they are generally humanoid in form. A minotaur, though, is a little too much like having sex with a cow, hence all the nitty-gritty details and goofy fucking around during this writeup. I still enjoyed my read through of this, but unlike with At The Crossing or She Came From The Swamp, I couldn’t stick my head into this one 100%. I kept wondering if hooves would suck when you’re spooning.

The reader should not take this as negative, or as a warning to avoid The Price on her Head, though. It’s just that, while I feel the otherworldly, non-human beings of the first two novellas are easy enough for the average normal to jive with, Suzanne Clay’s Minotaur Fucking Adventure requires a different kind of monster fucker, I guess. Total commitment to the half-cow half-human thing. If you were in dire need of trans lesbian minotaur sex, this is your jam, basically. Your eerily specific fantasy jam.

* https://apostrophen.wordpress.com/2021/01/03/the-shoulder-check-problem/