Well, this didn’t take long.

It has been brought to our attention that the ever-reliable Chuck Tingle has a new book out, Oppressed in the Butt by My Inclusive Holiday Coffee Cups. Because I feel that parody coffee cup porn is the perfect response to the ridiculous Starbucks coffee cup outrage, I volunteered to review the 4,700 word “book.” I even kind of enjoyed it. My mother must be so proud.

I’m just going to walk you through this, and yes, there will be spoilers.

The story is told in first-person narration by Jabua. Jabua loves Christmas. Specifically, he loves shopping at the mall. He has a policy not to drink any of Starbutt’s holiday drinks until the chain releases their holiday cups. One year, he decides to maximize his Christmas spirit by waiting in line overnight so he can be the very first Christmas Cup recipient. Yes, the coffee shop is named Starbutts, because the writer, like me, is apparently has the sense of humor of a twelve year old. My reaction to ‘Starbutts’ is as follows:

 

 

We are just a few pages into the book before Our Hero is dreaming about shirtless Jesus and Santa (they are described as “ripped”). This leads to a nightmarish sequence in which Santa gives our hero a cup of reindeer blood. Strangely, no sex acts are involved. I did not understand this dream and frankly although the Fires of Hell are being prepped for me just for thinking this, I feel a little cheated that there was no Jabua/Jesus/Santa action. But it was not to be.

Jabua wakes up and gets his Christmas Blend, but he’s so horrified to see that his cup is just a plain red cup (no snowflakes or other embellishments) that he passes out. When he wakes up, every time he thinks about the cup he either goes into cardiac arrest or starts to cry. Which leads to this conversation between Nurse Keenankle and Jabua:

“Starbutts is trying to make this season for everyone instead of just Christians. They’re oppressing me!”

“Well, I mean, does it really matter what the cup looks like?” Keenankle asks. “It’s just a cup.”

“Yes, it matters,” I retort. “I didn’t expect you to understand. These are my Christmas Cups! Don’t you understand that? Christmas is the only time that us Christians are not an oppressed minority and now they’re trying to take that away from us too!”

“I don’t know about that,” the nurse says skeptically.

“It’s true!” I tell her. “You’ll never understand until you’ve lived it, but it’s absolutely true and it’s not fair!”

“Well, alright sir,” Keenankle offers, “let’s just try not to get so worked up about the cup, though, okay? We don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Dear Nurse Keenankle, you are a voice of sanity in a mad world. Marry me.

Before you know it, Jabua is under observation at the hospital, where he has lots of supporters on social media and yet he can’t stop fantasizing about the new cup. Specifically, he can’t stop fantasizing about submerging his penis in a cup of coffee.

Maybe it’s cold in the hospital, I don’t know. Maybe his penis is sleepy.

Anyway, in a sudden swivel to the extremely surreal, he is visited by a group of coffee cups. Yep. Talking coffee cups. The cups are the holiday cups, but they are large and for reasons I fail to comprehend, they can talk, and they have faces, and they have penises, which answers my very, very ill-advised question, “How is this dude supposed to have group anal sex with coffee cups?” Now I know.

The cups bear no ill will towards Jabua. They want to make sure he’s OK. And he (homophobically) confesses his attraction:

“Can I be honest? I’ve always been really turned on by the holiday cups, not in a gay way or anything because I’m totally straight and I know all cups are dudes,” I admit. “I’ve always been able to keep it under wraps though, until now…This new design is just so nice, so sensual…so forbidden.”

An aside: First of all, I’d think coming out as bisexual (Jabua is married, apparently happily, to a woman, so I’m thinking he’s bi as opposed to gay) would be no big whoop after coming out as coffee-cup-oriented.

Secondly, I would have thought all cups would be dudettes, with the inside of the cup representing the vagina. I’ve never put any thought into cup gender before, but like all great works of literature, this book makes you look at the world around you in a new way. Maybe the author wanted to avoid being too obvious. Maybe gay holiday cup porn sells better than other kinds of porn. I don’t know. But the cups are dudes and they have penises. Also they are very sturdy, which is about to become important because if they had the structural integrity of a normal disposable cup then the scene which is about to take place would be less of a sex scene and more a scene of horrible mass murder.

This hospital visit leads to a very prolonged, explicit, messy, and joyful (and refreshingly consensual) group sex session, and I have to say that I am eternally grateful for the line, “Slam me full of your promotional holiday spirit!”

I also treasure the line, “Let’s make it a double shot, boys!” Behold, my Christmas card slogan for the year.

And… that’s the end of the story. Jabua has fabulous group sex and changes his mind about the whole holiday cup issue.

Spoiler alert, here’s the end of the book:

I close my eyes and smile warmly, finally understanding the true meaning of the holiday spirit. It’s not about who can spend the most money at the mall, or who can get the most upset by someone saying, “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

No, what the holidays are really about is who can get pounded in the butt by a cup that represents not just one holiday, but every holiday. It’s about having an open heart, and an open butt.

 

The End.

Here’s the thing – this story is completely transparent about what it’s about and what you are going to get. It says how many words it is right there on Amazon, so it’s not tricking you into spending $3 on what you think is a novel. It involves a gay coffee cup orgy – says so right there on Amazon. So while I wouldn’t, in the normal run of my day, buy a short story with quite so much semen in it, I wasn’t shocked – I got what it said I would get. I was a little disappointed that the sex was with cups with penises, though. It seems like a cheat. Frankly, and I’m not proud of this, my big question was “How goes a guy have a coffee cup orgy, anyway? Does he just…what? Stick them up his butt one by one? How would this work?” It’s actually totally normal gay sex, only with a lot of participants. Once things get going, the fact that the penises are attached to coffee cups (human sized, talking coffee cups) is pretty incidental. The sex is, anatomically speaking, very enthusiastic, and very detailed, but it’s not super creative.

There’s one great thing, though, that I did not expect, and that is that this story is genuinely funny and clever. From Nurse Keenankle’s response to Jabua’s final epiphany, the story contains some pretty sharp satire, and has actually a rather nice message about inclusiveness, even though in Jabua’s case the word “inclusive” carries with it some unusual sexual connotations. I realize mileage varies when it comes to humor, but when Jabua said, “Slam me full of your promotional spirit!” I just cracked up.

I have no idea how to grade this. Would I recommend it? Not unless you really want to read a story that consists at least fifty percent of a coffee cup orgy – and if you do, I’m not judging. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t recommend this based solely on the humor, or the plot, or because the sex is so explicit and raunchy. The story ends incredibly abruptly. It doesn’t make any sense, but again, you can tell from the title that it won’t make sense so it’s not like you’ve been conned into thinking you were reading a documentary about cup fetishes.

Frankly, the book, even the orgy, makes more sense than the whole coffee cup political drama makes in real life.

On the other hand, I assumed the story would be just plain awful, and instead it was truly funny. It’s the Inclusive Coffee Cup story we deserve – very irreverent, very silly, and with the sweetest message one can hope for in a story that includes many pages of group anal sex with coffee cups.