Once Upon A Time

By Lisabet Sarai

Do not believe what you hear of me. It was not to preserve my chastity that I was imprisoned here, in this amusingly phallic tower with its sealed entrance and single window. I have not been a virgin for years; even my father knows that. In the cesspit of hypocrisy that is his court, no one cares what goes on behind closed doors. Only appearances matter.

And appearances are what landed me here in this unorthodox prison. I'm confined to this aerie because despite all blandishments and threats, I refused to cut my hair.

In a society like ours, valuing external neatness and order above else, my wild auburn locks are an offense to public decency, or so my royal parents would like me to believe. My father's crown rests upon a bald pate, shaved daily. My mother and sisters wear pale helmets of curls that are clipped back whenever they grow beyond the earlobes. Every proper citizen plucks, trims, waxes and shaves to eliminate any hint of the hirsute.

Not I. I love my hair, not just the luxurious tresses that flow over my shoulders and down to the floor, but the rest, too: my unfashionably bushy eyebrows, the soft tufts gracing my armpits, the wiry tangle that hides my sex. My hair is a source of my power. My father suspects as much. An ancient prophecy says the kingdom shall one day be lost to a red-haired sorceress and he fears I am the fulfillment of that promise.

He need not worry. I care not for the sort of power he wields. All I want is freedom - to travel the world, to think for myself, to love whom I please. To my father, I am nothing but a bargaining chip in the game of alliances. For that role, my hair diminishes my worth - as do my forthright tongue and legendary temper. I'm pleased to note that I've successfully discouraged every suitor the king attempted to lure into taking me off his hands.

His ambitious majesty sent his minions to my room while I slept, to shear me by force. When one returned with a broken arm, the other soaked with blood from the scissors embedded in his chest, the king decided prison was the only way to deal with the threat posed by my independence. He spread the tale that the servants had been injured fighting off rapists. Under pretext of guarding his beloved daughter from ravishment, he locked me in this lofty turret and sealed the door from the outside.

*****

That's the start of my story “Shorn”, an erotic take on the tale of Rapunzel that appeared in Kristina Wright's anthology Lustfully Ever After: Fairy Tale Erotic Romance. My Rapunzel, as you may gather from this snippet, is no simpering princess languishing in her tower while awaiting her prince charming. She's more a kick ass outlaw, eager to rid herself of the constraints of her position. Oh, a prince does find her - a gentle, wounded soul who's as much an outcast as she is. And of course I suggest that they'll live happily ever after, because this was an erotic romance collection and because some people are under the illusion that fairy tales follow the same rules.

Not so. The original folk stories that we identify as “fairy tales” carried a thread of darkness and violence. The Brothers Grimm deserved their name. In the original fairy tales, evil sometimes prevails – and indeed, the evil might well reside within the hero or heroine as opposed to being externalized in some witch or ogre. Selfishness – stubbornness – laziness – petty cruelty – these are the sort of flaws that lead fairy tale characters to their sorry fates. Even when the protagonist triumphs, he or she is often wounded or diminished in some way. Consider the Little Mermaid, forced to renounce her beloved ocean and to live with the constant pain of walking upon two legs.

I like the original versions a good deal more than the sanitized Andrew Lang/Walt Disney treatments. I find them more honest.

Erotic authors have traded on the eternal popularity of these stories for a long time. An Amazon search in the Books category for “erotic fairy tales” yielded 1,189 results. Kristina's collection showed up on page 4 of 100 – not too bad, I guess. The top tales for erotic retelling seemed to be Beauty and the Beast (possibly my favorite due to its obvious BDSM echoes), Little Red Riding Hood (who doesn't have the hots for wolves?), Goldilocks (a natural for a group sex tale) and Snow White (likewise!). Alice in Wonderland shows up quite a lot (though I wouldn't categorize that as a fairy tale), as do Hansel and Gretel and Rumplestiltskin. There are renditions where both the prince and the princess are guys - stories with Cinderella dominating her wicked step mother - Hansel and Gretel getting it on together... you get the picture.

Although I can admire a skillful and arousing twist to an old plot, I'm more impressed by new stories crafted in the fairy tale tradition. Back in 2006, I contributed to an erotic fairy tale anthology edited by Sage Vivant and M. Christian entitled The Garden of the Perverse. I'm not sure my offering, “Cat's Eye”, really managed to capture the peculiar flavor and ethos of a fairy tale world. However, some of the other offerings in that book were incredible. In particular, I loved Remittance Girl's creepy and delicious “Pipe of Thorns” (which you'll also find in her Coming Together Presents volume). In fact her tale is not set in the domain of princesses and dragons, but in a city reminiscent of Victorian London. However, I found the sense of menace, of a dark fate made more or less inescapable by the protagonist's flaws, a perfect fit to my notion of what a fairy tale should be.

I should also mention Jean Roberta's excellent collection Obsession, which features several stories with fairy tale echoes, including a highly transgressive Hansel and Gretel yarn. Maybe she'll share a bit of one of those stories in her post next week!

Meanwhile, I guess I'll leave you with a bit of Cat's Eye, which seems to be the only other fairy tale I've written.

*****

Generally, the village people avoided Nimon. When he was a child, they used to call their own children inside, if he happened down their street. They would peer from behind half-closed doors and whisper among themselves. Now that he was a young man, they greeted him politely, but without warmth. They bought the marvelously clever carvings he hawked from door to door, utensils and ornaments, but no one invited him in to sit by the hearth and share a glass of cider.

With his tawny skin, jet hair and lithe body, he was a handsome man, and prosperous, too, by village standards. Nevertheless the village beauties never assailed him with flirtatious banter, the way that they did the other youths. They stood awkward and quiet, with eyes downcast, until he passed. No father had approached Grandma Moira, with whom he made his home, with offers of a dowry.

Simple people fear what they do not understand, and no one understood Nimon. The rumors had been repeated and embellished in the nineteen years since his birth. His mother Leileah, a fair virgin of good family, suddenly and inexplicably grew heavy with child. Disobeying her parents for the first time in her life, she refused to reveal the father. And when her time grew near, she shunned the attentions of the midwives, fleeing on her own to the forested hills. A week later she returned with her ebony-haired, green-eyed son.

The village folk, including Nimon's mother, all had hair the color of straw, eyes the color of sky. The babe was strange in other ways, too. He would stare at you for the longest time without blinking, his oval pupils huge and midnight black. His pudgy fingers were tipped with nails much longer and sharper than a normal baby's. He never cried.

After his birth, Leileah became as silent as her child. Her lovely flaxen hair grew long, tangled and unkempt. Her cornflower eyes sparked with madness. Within a month, she left her parents' home, moving into Grandma Moira's big, ramshackle house at the edge of the hills.

Her family pleaded for her to stay. Secretly, though, they were relieved to have their stranger of a daughter out from under their roof. It seemed natural for her to go to Moira, strange drawn to strange. No one saw much of Leileah or Nimon after that. The people normally didn't tend to bother Moira, unless they needed a healing draught for their cows, or a love potion.

When Nimon was two, the wasting sickness came to the village. Nimon's mother died early; her parents followed a few weeks later. Some folk said that Leileah was punished for taking a stranger to her bed, and her parents for rejecting her afterwards. But people always like to talk. In truth, many in the village died; were all of them transgressors?

Still, tales of Nimon's mysterious parentage were always popular around the winter hearth. The father was an Arab prince, some claimed, who had galloped by the village on his white stallion and ravished Leileah as she was working in the fields. Others said that he was the Lord of the Underworld, well-known for ruining innocent virgins and carrying them back to his subterranean kingdom. A forest demon, still others claimed.
Hadn't Leileah fled to woods to give birth? Didn't the child have animal eyes and claws? Then someone would laugh, and change the subject.

So Nimon grew to manhood, orphaned, raised by a wise woman whom most people called crazy, shunned by the village. For the most part, he didn't care what the people thought of him. He roamed the forest, slinking along trails that only he could see, bringing colored stones or wild herbs back to his adoptive mother. He ran through the fields, naked and glorying in his strength, laughing when the girls busy with the planting or the harvest blushed and looked away.

Some nights, though, as he lay on the ground staring up at a ripe moon, he felt a kind of emptiness come upon him. He didn't recall his mother's face, but he remembered her smell, the warm, musky smell of unwashed female skin. It seemed to engulf him on these nights, drowning out the fragrance of honeysuckle and fresh-cut hay. These nights his penis swelled up hard as the oak logs he used for his carving. Touching himself was simultaneously pain and pleasure. He grasped his erection with both hands, squeezing and pummeling his flesh, desperate to release the demons that seemed to be warring inside him.

He remembered the women in the fields, with their skirts tucked up above their knees and their bodices damp with sweat. He tried to imagine them without clothes. But the images of rounded limbs and rosy breasts kept slipping away. Instead he saw only a whirlwind, swirling shards of darkness that circled faster the closer he came to the climax.

*****

If you're interested, you can read the rest of the story on my website.

Two Books, One Hand

by Jean Roberta

Several weeks ago, I agreed with erotic writer Zander Vyne to do a review exchange: Zander sent me a PDF of his/her recent collection of stories, Amaranthine Rain (Burning Book Press) so that I could review it, and I sent Zander a PDF of my recent story collection: The Princess and the Outlaw: Tales from the Torrid Past (Lethe Press).

So far, Zander’s stories are as scintillating as dark jewels. The narrators are varied, but each seems completely authentic. Zander plays with various flavours of “noir.” In “Tricked,” a hard-boiled PI goes to Las Vegas in search of a young woman that no one else cares about, and he finds that he can’t forget her. In the fairy tale,“Amethyst’s Feather,” Princess Amethyst discovers her true desire in the deep dark woods. In the title story, “Amaranthine Rain,” a fairly typical middle-class American man named Jack (a lawyer, like several other characters in these stories) has an epiphany about his life and his marriage when he and his wife Diane are literally lost in a storm at sea.

Stay tuned for the full review.

I rarely have time to read hard-cover books on topics beyond erotic and LGBT subject-matter, but my last few days in the hospital gave me the time to crack open a hefty biography of a brave mover and shaker, Florence Bean James, who (together with her equally multi-faceted husband, Burton James) set up community theatres in Boston in the 1920s, and then in Seattle, Washington, until government persecution in the McCarthy Era drove them out of the U.S. to Saskatchewan, the most left-leaning province in Canada of the time. While other social activists were planning the health-care system that became reality in 1962 (a kind of early model of Obamacare, based on Britain’s socialized health care system of 1948), the Jameses were instrumental in setting up arts organizations here, including the Sask Arts Board and several theatre groups.

Fists Upon a Star, Florence James’ moving autobiography, was finally produced after her death with help from a local writer, Jean Freeman. It was launched at the local Globe Theatre (one of the institutions inspired by the Jameses) by the publisher, the newly-named University of Regina Press. I went to the launch and bought a copy.

I didn’t know when I would have time to read this tome, but fate intervened.

On Monday, November 4, I was walking home from the bus stop when I slipped on snow-covered ice within sight of my house. My right hand clutched my briefcase, and my left hand went out to brace myself. I landed on my bum (a natural flesh airbag) and my left wrist, which was broken in several places. I went home, caught a taxi to the hospital, got X-rayed and was scheduled for emergency surgery the next day.

My spouse came to see me from the conference she was attending in another town, and my two stepsons rushed to my side. My family, the hospital staff, and the surgeon who put a metal plate and 11 screws in my wrist (an expert in this type of fine work) were all amazing. I don’t think I could have been treated better.

My colleagues and department head at the university have handled my classes all this week. Apparently it takes a village to handle a slip-and-fall accident. Now I know that my support system is much more solid than my bones!

I’m typing this with one hand. (Luckily, I’m right-handed.) I seem to be recovering well, and I look forward to the use of two hands on a keyboard.

What I'm Reading Lately . . .

by Amanda Earl

Anne Tourney's "Taming Jeremy: A Rouge Erotic Romance" (Cheek, 2010) is about a woman torn between a control freak dominant who schedules her time for various boundary pushing sexual adventures and a bipolar artist who gets her to paint murals and spins her around when he kisses her. I decided to check out what else Tourney had written because I liked her story "Come for Me, Dark Man"  in "Sacred Exchange." The story was perhaps a bit more intense and more to my preference, but this novel is an enjoyable read.

TR Verten's "Confessions of a Rent Boy" (Burning Book Press, 2nd Edition, 2012) is a fun read about a 20-something fellow named Andy who ends up working as an escort in London. I like Verten's style; it's snappy and articulate. I'd like to read more of her writing. Burning Book Press is a fairly new publisher started up by some excellent erotica writers, including Aisling Weaver, Wyeth Bailey, Raziel Moore, Ximena Mendez, Will Crimson, T.R. Verten, Michele Bekemeyer and Remittance Girl. RG describes the press as "an indie press dedicated to intelligent creative writing for grown-up readers who don’t require hand-holding, moral guidance, or limited vocabulary reading matter." Hurray! The press is putting out some quality titles and I can see already that I'm going to be a loyal follower.

"Secrecy"  by Rupert Thomson (Granta Books, 2013) is a novel set in 17th century Florence about the intriguing encounters and adventures of a wax moulder. I discovered the author at a recent fall reading at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. I haven't started the book yet, but am looking forward to it. When he read from it, his descriptions were remarkably sensual and vivid.

"The English Stories" by Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis, 2009)  is another book I discovered at the Writers Festival. I liked Flood's style. There was a Q&A about writing craft and Flood may have spoken (or it could have been someone else, my memory's hazy) about the small moment of the short story. Also about how writers can mine their childhoods for memories that can find their way into their work. She read from her most recent collection "Red Girl RatBoy," (Biblioasis, 2013) which also sounded compelling.

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville is a book I've been meaning to read for ages. I'm about 25% through it and I'm captivated by the language, the imagery, the humour and the characters, not to mention the anticipation of the encounter with the massive creature.

Reading is my great pleasure.  If it is yours, please tell me in the comments section about your current reads. I'd love a few recommendations.

Henry and June and Anais

by Daddy X

I’ve been taken literary hostage by the Diary of Anais Nin, now approaching the end of vol. 2. So enamored by her prose, her philosophy and words, I’ve even changed my email signature to include a quote of hers.

Delta of Venus has resided in my cabinet for years, but until I found vols 1, 2, and 4 of Nin’s diary in a used book shop, I hadn’t read any of the journals themselves. Was that ever a lucky find! After finishing the first book, I quickly ordered the missing vol. 3 from my pal at our local bookstore, The Loveable Rogue.  

The size and complexity of the manuscript (Nin wrote in English, French and Spanish) required entire subjects to be cut to achieve some attempt at brevity. Consequently, editor Gunter Stuhlmann explains that most of the sexual escapades and references to Nin’s husband, Hugh Guiler, have been removed from the published text, except those details absolutely necessary to the story the editor elects to tell.

Yes, it’s been edited. But Stuhlmann has retained spontaneity, keeping the journal’s effect extemporaneous and human, while allowing the spectrum of her intimates’ changing moods, eccentricities and foibles open to exposure. Her thoughts are received by the reader as conversation. Her prose is not perfect. She shifts tense. She adds extraneous words. Her philosophical premises are not always resolved.

Stuhlmann maintains a rare insight for identifying the conditions that made Nin’s diverse acquaintances operate the way they chose, keeping enough selected material from the original manuscript to convince me of his (and Nin’s) assumptions.

Conversely, the book Henry and June (gleaned from sections of the diary that Stuhlmann  eliminated) revisits the emotional and sexual aspects of Nin’s acquaintances and loves. For the most complete take on her 1931-34 years, Henry and June should probably be read concurrently with the first volume of her diary, filling in the time of Anais’ and Henry Miller’s heated love affair.

Their passion accelerated when Miller’s wife, June, had gone off on a tear. That wasn’t too uncommon for June, the gorgeous (and a bit nuts) blonde who apparently took a toll on anyone she encountered

A physical relationship between Nin and Miller is hinted at in the diaries, but in no way as strongly depicted as we find in Henry and June. It’s all her words, in her style, in both works, and her gorgeous language persists, although Henry & June entertains with more emphasis on eroticism and her analysis of the topic.

Complicating the already crazy situation are Nin’s others loves, which also come to a clearer light in Henry and June. Love for her husband. Love for June, both physical desire and emotional obsession. All this in addition to apparent ‘mercy fucks’ with various artists, poets, revolutionaries, bohemians and general hangers-on to this remarkable, giving, empathic woman.

There are many compelling aspects to Nin’s work. She writes with such a soothing interior quality, enticing the reader into a world immersed in the arts. Nin’s world.

What becomes evident is the power of this charismatic woman herself. Born into a family of musical luminaries, she is constantly surrounded by celebrities: From the Baron De Rothschild to Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Conrad Moricand and Lawrence and Nancy Durrell, to name a few.

Not that the diary is all sophisticated social banter and positive introspective speculation. Even before I began reading Henry and June alongside the diaries, I perceived possible bi-polar tilts in her writing: one month up, next month agitated, following month down. Pychologists, psychiatrists, students of Freud. Detractors of Freud. A trip to the United States to work with Dr. Otto Rank. Nin herself becomes a therapist in NewYork.

The do-it-yourselfer seeking a fix?

The fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War plays a background to the thirties in Europe. (Although the Nazis assimilated Italian fascism and were later defeated in WW2, Spanish fascism prevailed until Franco’s death in 1975.) Anais welcomes the camaraderie and passion of the anti-Fascists, but not the violence. As a woman of action, this conundrum hangs heavy upon her. She is found evaluating the scale of resistance as she questions acceptable tools of the movement. She buys a friend a printing press to produce revolutionary material for the cause.

What a rounded ‘Renaissance Man’ of a woman.

Nin often runs with an unhealthy abandon, working herself to the edge, not sleeping; rather feeding, supporting, mothering, clothing the helpless, broken men (and women) of Paris’ emerging art scene. While self-destructives continually pop into her sphere, Nin keeps them from starving or killing themselves. She pays their rents. She buys them food. She cleans their squalid rooms. Everyone in Anais’ life wants or needs something. So far, according to her, she hasn’t yet learned to say ‘no’.

Her revelatory and poignant asides, introspective dissertations concerning the writer as artist, bring to mind Lawrence Durrell’s similar insights explored in his Alexandria Quartet. A comparison of styles and conclusions offers consistent reminders of their influence on each other’s work and philosophies.

As an ultimate chronicler of Bohemian 30’s France, Nin proves as dependable as a Pepys  or a Proust in their respective times, her measured prose offering the reader clear perceptions of various states of being in Paris and beyond.

Last week, Lisabet noted that certain artistic works are to be savored. Nin’s meliflous, evocative prose—spare but rich with vocabulary and dynamism, written in monthly journal form, may be taken in little sips. Like a fine Sherry, all it takes is a sip. Nin’s words guide us through an intellectual digestive system, gently affirming precise, impressions, concise truths … or lies … uncovered within herself, her entourage … and often within ourselves.

Although there’s not much in the way of sexually descriptive imagery in the diaries, that’s not to say she avoids spontaneous introspection:

(From The Diary of Anais Nin vol 2)

The entire mystery of pleasure in a woman’s body is in the intensity of the pulsation just before the orgasm. Sometimes it is slow, one-two-three, three palpitations which then project a fiery and icy liqueur through the body. If the palpitation is feeble, muted, the pleasure is like a gentler wave, the pocket seed of ecstasy bursts with more or less energy, when it is richest it touches every portion of the body, vibrating through every nerve and cell. If the palpitation is intense, the rhythm and beat of it is slower and the pleasure more lasting. Electric flesh-arrows, a second wave of pleasure falls over the first, a third which touches every nerve end, and now like an electric current traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm. There are times when a woman feels her body but lightly played on. Others when it reaches such a climax it seems it can never surpass. So many climaxes. Some caused by tenderness, some by desire, some by a word or an image seen during the day. There are times when the day itself demands a climax, days of cumulative sensations and unexploded feelings. There are days which do not end in a climax, when the body is asleep or dreaming other dreams. There are days when the climax is not pleasure but pain, jealousy, terror, anxiety. And there are days when the climax takes place in creation, a white climax. Revolution is another climax. Sainthood another. 

My favorite time to read Ms. Nin is in bed, heating blanket on, Anais’ sensuous passages sending me off on a lyrical drift into a deep night’s sleep. We wonder how many readers have been similarly comforted.

Books to make you feel really, really good

When I am deep in a manuscript I try to read against type for two reasons: (1) so I don’t let another author’s voice bleed into mine and (2) to give my brain a rest. I want something that’s a great combination of hot chocolate and Jack Daniel’s-soothing and biting. (I know, I know, but it works for me.)

I read a lot. When I get in bed at night after writing all day that’s my time to relax and transport myself. I collect a lot of authors but there are three that are better than hot chocolate, Jack Daniel’s and tranquilizers for me, because I lose myself in the wonderful writing and it smooth’s out the wrinkles of the day.

I found Marie Force’s McCarthy’s of Gansett Island series when Book #1, Maid For Love, was free on BookBub (hint-a great sales tool). I have since bought every book in the series and have the latest one on preorder. Marie tells the stories of the wonderful McCarthy family on an island similar to Block Island off the coast of Providence, RI. Meet the hot men and the women they love. There is nothing boilerplate about these stories. The people are real and you will fall in love with them. As much as I love finding new authors, I reread these books‑at least parts of them-over and over.

With more than 1 million ebooks sold since Maid for Love debuted in 2011, the New York Times bestselling McCarthys of Gansett Island Series has become one of the most beloved romance series available today. Yes, indeed. Check her out at https://marieforce.com

Along the same line is the Wild Irish series by Mari Carr. I bought the first book because she’s a friend of mine and I like to support my friends. Little did I know I would fall head over heels in love with the Collins family and become as addicted to them as I am to Marie Force’s McCarthy family.

The stories center around the traditional nursery rhyme, Monday’s Child.

 Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living,

But the child who is born on the Sabbath day,

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay

Each story is built around one member of the Collins family. They each have unique personalities and very unique needs. But what ties them all together is their total commitment to family and to each other. Again, I find myself rereading them, or parts of them, over and over because they make me feel so good.

Find Mari at http://maricarr.com

And for a total change of pace I am totally in love with Debra Webb’s Faces of Evil series. These stories center around former FBI agent Jess Harris, back in her home town of Birmingham, AL after her career implodes, and police chief Dan Burnett, her once and present love. Debra really knows how to make these two characters come alive, convey their battles and challenges and their struggle to find the basis for their relationship in the conflict of their jobs and past history.

Another reason I like these books is because Jess and Dan are in their forties. They’ve seen a lot of life, they come to this with a lot of baggage and they take they relationship seriously. Although each book has its own thriller story, there is a continuing thread about the deranged stalker plaguing Jess and the bloodthirsty trail he leaves for her to follow. You will not be able to put these books down.

Find her at http://www.debrawebb.com

So what do you like to read? Leave me a comment, tell me what book is at the top of your TBR list and you might get it as a surprise!

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www.desireeholt.com

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Reviews, Research, and the Quest for Filthy

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Reading Starts Wonderful Journeys

Post by Lily Harlem

When I first started on my journey as an author I attended a weekly creative writing course, run by the local university. I was the youngest student by decades, the eldest being ninety-one.

The teacher was vibrant and enthusiastic and a bottomless well of knowledge all things literature. One day I expressed an interest in writing erotica and he told me that a good place to start would be Pauline Réage.

I dashed home and ordered Reage’s classic tale of female submission The Story of O.

I expect many of you have come across this book, and I know full well scholars have spent hours studying it and writing thesis on it. I'm not one of those people, I just read it one day, several years ago. So please don't mistake me for an expert on its plot lines and intricacies. But what it did was start me on a journey that would make sex and BDSM a frequent visitor in my writing.

The book follows the sexual journey of O, a young French woman who seeks to be submissive to her lover Renee. He takes her to a chateau, Roissy, where she undergoes ‘training’. This section of the book is heavy on the BDSM, full of humiliation, pain and sexual perversions. O is forced to share her body with a large group of men, being viewed and treated only as an object and left strung up in a dark, cold corner of the chateau.

I thought there were bits of this section that were extreme but O constantly gives her permission despite her discomfort. 

After this initial ‘training’ O lives as Renee’s slave, never allowed to cross her legs and always available for him to take her whenever, however he wants. Renee encourages his elder step brother, Sir Stephen, to also use O – I say use because that is very much how it is written. Renee tells Sir Stephen that he will reserve her anus just for his use, kind of like a gift.

I remember this bit of the book standing out for me. The way the two men talk about O as she is pushed over, her rear in the air. It is as if they are talking about a horse they can share or a piece of clothing, not a human. But O laps it up, she feels that this is her next great test; to be able to be a sex slave to a man she doesn’t love.

Just when you think love is lacking it happens. I won’t spoil the story for any of you that haven't read it but there continues to be lots of whipping, blindfolds, ménage, piercings and sex, sex, sex.

The Story of O was first published in 1954 in France, the English edition 1965. Pauline Reage is the pen name of Anne Desclos though she did not reveal her true identity until forty years after publication. She then claimed that the book was a series of love letters to her beau Jean Paulhan. I have to say, that it is one hell of a love letter by anyone’s standards.

A sequel Return to the Chateau, Continuing the Story of O was published in France although it is seems up for debate as to whether or not it was written by the original author.

The fact that O has a single letter for her name is significant. It is claimed to be short for Odile, but also could signify O as in orifice, or O for object or even as the symbol of a hole. In O’s case, any hole her master saw fit to penetrate. You can buy pieces of jewelry with O on it that specifically represents the book and female submission.

Anyone else read it, enjoyed it, seen the DVD??? I'll be around to natter - time zones permitting.

Lily x