Carrie's Story

Erotica is a tricky thing. I've read and written a lot of it. For over ten years I was an editor at Penthouse Variations, which is a monthly magazine devoted to first-person narratives about alternative sexual practices. In short, it was classy whacking material. I wrote hundreds of these stories, which are written mostly by professional writers (the letters, however, are real).

Writing good erotica means walking a fine line. You want to excite the reader, but you want it to be good writing, as well.

Erotic novels also walk this fine line. There are classics of the genre, that are more literary, such as Lady Chatterly's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, but these are not the kinds of books you read with a tube of lube nearby. There are, of course, the kind of cheap paperbacks you find in bus stations, where the writers are paid by the word and the books appear under different titles depending on the edition.

Now, when the topic is S&M, there is even a thinner line. This genre, for those who aren't drawn to the world, can be pretty silly, or even offensive. But I find that devotees of this life are particularly interested in reading about it. There have been classics of its type, such as The Story of O and the Beauty series by Anne Rice.

Another to add is Carrie's Story, by Molly Weatherfield. It's a very well written, but extremely hot novel about a young woman who submits to a master and enters his world. Unlike Anne Rice's Beauty series, it's set in the real world, so we get some of the real-life details of what happens when one becomes someone's sex slave. The writing is also aware of how absurd the situation is, and there is a gentle dollop of humor.

In her introduction, Weatherfield writes that she was trying to avoid "chateau porn," which is what most S&M fiction is (a palatial estate, full of slaves on their knees undergoing "training" by a slew of masters). At times she dips into that, in a somewhat ridiculous chapter where the heroine is trained as a pony, complete with sleeping in a stall. But overall this is a terrific book of its type.