Review: The Eternal Party

The Eternal Party
H. ”Dark End” Townsend

FurPlanet Productions
July 2024

Print Edition $19.95
Ebook Edition $9.95 (DRM-free)

The Eternal Party is a story about a cat woman who (seemingly?) accidentally stumbles into a magical house where a never-ending sex party has been running for decades. The house’s “enchantments enforce two ironclad rules: ‘canines command and felines obey,’ and ‘you can only enter if you want to be here’” (quoting the blurb). Except Mila doesn’t want to be there, and the house won’t let her leave. Sounds like an excuse to just write a whole bunch of kink scenes, right? There are indeed a whole bunch.

Here’s what The Eternal Party also is: a story about navigating grief.

The story opens with the most classic of haunted house clichés: taking shelter in a spooky, seemingly deserted manor house whose door locks behind you. As Mila finds herself in the midst of a soirée that’s both elegant and startlingly kinky, she’s discovered by Alonso, a fox who’s even more startled by her presence than she is at being there. He quickly outlines the rules above, adding, “I can protect you, but you have to say that you are mine,” but she has to say it and mean it: it must be her choice.

Now, you might imagine where the story’s going to go from there, but Alonso means what he says about protecting her—and about trying to help her find out how to leave. He and his friend Aisha the jackal explain that Mila came in through the side door, something that shouldn’t be possible: except that, once in a while, it is, and people who have no interest in the Eternal Party become trapped there.

The story is about Mila and Alonso exploring one another’s kinks, but it’s not a dark story, at least not in the ways its blurb, and a superficial description of the premise, suggests it might be. All the sex is consensual, safety tacitly enforced by the enchantments embedded in the house. There is no antagonist in The Eternal Party in any conventional sense, either, only mysteries both magical and mundane: both Mila and Alonso have personal tragedies in their past, trauma they haven’t resolved. I was surprised at how emotionally invested I became in the stories of all three main characters, and even the story of the house itself (which is, in its own way, a fourth main character).

Hot take here: making sex scenes necessary to a story’s plot or character arcs is actually pretty damn hard. Erotica stories, particularly shorter ones, often have just barely enough plot to maneuver the characters into the sex scenes; the ones with well-developed throughlines and character development often could have their explicit scenes deleted without materially changing the work. The Eternal Party pulls off making the sex integral to the larger plot.

And in an odd way, that makes it a little frustrating: this is one of the best furry novels I’ve read recently, with rich, complex characters, believable dialogue, intriguing worldbuilding, and polished writing, but I know I can’t recommend it without hesitation to everyone. However, as long as you are cool with a lot of kinky sex—no, probably more than you’re imagining right now—The Eternal Party is a terrific read.