"Destined to Feel" by Indigo Bloome

In this erotic thriller, the sequel to Destined to Play, Alexa (Dr Alexandra Blake) flies to London to be reunited with her lover, controlling Jeremy Quinn. As she leaves the airport she is abducted by sinister forces. What plot for world domination is being hatched and will Alexa ever escape from the clutches of XSade?

Interspersed with the thriller plot are episodes f explicit erotic sex either remembered between Alexa and Jeremy or new.

Some good lines:

• “Once you become a mother it is as if you have a god-given right to share your experience and knowledge with newer less practised mothers who you feel are in desperate and urgent need of your extensive fountain of knowledge. ... we share our all-encompassing sage advice to both enhance our own ego (and reinforce to ourselves that we are on the correct parenting path)” (p 5)
• “When it comes to women, statements are far more effective than questions; that way, they don't have to give themselves permission.... If they say nothing, you have told them what will happen. They can always say no, but never seem to” (p 41) 
• “Then nothingness blankets my brain like a snuffer putting out a candle’s flame.” (p 170)

July 2018; 323 pages

"The Wild Boys" by William Burroughs

Burroughs, heir to a fortune, dropped out, became a junky, killed his wife and wrote gay erotica. His books are so much of their time. The Wild Boys was written in 1969.

Burroughs wrote a number of his books using a 'cut up' technique: narratives were written, cut and pasted in a different order. This makes it very difficult to talk of a plot. The Wild Boys is about a group of boys near Marrakech who go feral and roam the desert (and. it seems. the Mexican jungle) killing and having ritualistic gay sex. The story mixes in science fiction and supernatural elements: one gay ritual involves boys creating 'zimbus' during gay copulation enabling the tribe to procreate without women.

In the late sixties these books must have seemed daring and avant garde. But now it is relevant to ask whether they are actually any good.

The book starts with a description of a derelict Mexican slum. It appears in the first paragraph and is then forgotten. The first paragraph has a fly-by drone taking photos; the second concentrates on adjectives of dereliction such as choked, rusty, cracked and broken; the third introduces colours. There are lots of colours in this book; they are almost his favourite adjectives. Yet his palette isn't terribly extensive and the same colours are repeated again and again.

Repetition is also a feature of the book and one wonders whether the cut-up style might have been invented to space out the repetitions and avoid them seeming to become burdensome. Certainly, fragments from the erotic couplings are repeated again and again; Burroughs seems to see this as a sort of peep show arcade as opposed to the blue movies which are given rather more story and rather less sex.

After some effort, we arrive at the meat of the novel. A number of named characters, all young boys, including prep-school Aubrey and all-Americans Johnny and his cousin Mark, and poor Mexican Kiki have anal sex. These episodes seem to be retellings of first times. Rather cutely, Burroughs takes refuge in Spanish when it comes to some of the more explicit moments: vuelvete y aganchete means turn around and get down, quiero follarte means I want to fuck, buen lugar para follar means good place to fuck etc. Intrioguingly this, the pornographic heart of the novel, straddles (I think that might be an apposite word) the dead centre of the book.

So far, so undistinguished. Burroughs has produced a shocking book which aspires to literary greatness partly because of its subject matter but also because of its disdain for many of the literary conventions. Does that make it good or merely self-regarding?

The only reason Burroughs gets away with it at all is because of his ability to create vivid images. The whole wild boys adventure is a fantasy and others can go further down this road. But there are some phrases which stand out:

• "A jungle seen through a faceted eye that looks simultaneously in any direction up or down"
• "Occasionally the overseer adjusts a slow worker with his eyes."
• "trailing white-hot wires like a jellyfish"
• "Everyone has reversible linings and concealed pockets"
• "the walking dead catatonic from hunger ... the legs of this river of flesh ... burrows of walking flesh."

In the end, though, it is just another sixties work of art promising a revolution that was never delivered.

Allegedly, David Bowie was influenced by the book when creating his androgynous image (and possibly also by the paragraph which talks of two astronauts, gay lovers, who orbit in a Gemini space capsule which then loses radio contact; this seems a possible source for Major Thom).

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

November 2015; 184 pages

"The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter

This is a collection of short stories ranging from 2 pages long to 42 pages long. The stories are, in essence, a retelling of fairy tales: Bluebeard, Dracula, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots etc.

They are transformed by the author's sensuous and luxuriant prose and by a powerful eroticism. Puss in Boots is told from the cat's point of view and imbued with the physicality of a feline. The title piece, the Bloody Chamber, reconstructs Bluebeard and describes with delight the mingled pleasure and disgust as the heroine surrenders her maidenhead to her new husband. The Lady of the House of Love is a vampiress who lures young men into her bed, simultaneously seducing and murdering them.

The theme of this book is the interplay between erotic sex and carnal death and Carter's beautiful gems of stories celebrate the animal in mankind.

Wonderful words. November 2012; 149 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog:

• The Bloody Chamber, a brilliant collection of short stories in which fairy tales are brought up to date and given a horrid, and often feminist, twist
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: a very sixties psychedelic romp, perhaps too surreal for me
• Heroes and Villains: a post-holocaust fantasy
• The Passion of New Eve: obsessed with mirrors and sex changes and dominatrices
• Wise Children: the reminiscences of one of a pair of show-biz twins; multiple references to twins and Shakespeare
• The Magic Toyshop: a beautifully written coming of age story

"Delta of Venus" by Anais Nin

This is a Penguin Modern Classic. The blurb calls it a "glittering cascade of sexual encounters .... Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning." It is a dirty book. The short stories cover more or less every conceivable sort of sex including necrophilia, lesbianism, homosexuality, fetishism, voyeurism, bestiality ... Basically it is pornography. I certainly didn't get a feel for character or "a world where only love has meaning". Mostly it was a boring list of bits and who did what to whom; it was rarely arousing. Sometimes there was pretentiousness: "the famous Parisian chic" that gives a "Parisian woman a trimness, an audacity, that far surpasses the seductiveness of other women."

Perhaps it was shocking and groundbreaking when it came out, revealing that women had naughty thoughts on a par with those of men, but today it is a slightly boring dirty book.

Hard to finish. April 2010; 225 pages