Disinformation Book of Lists (23 page)

10

The Beauty trilogy
by Anne Rice

After making a name with her debut novel
The Vampire Chronicles
, and in the midst of writing
The Vampire Lestat
, Anne Rice published three erotic SM novels, one each year from 1983 to 1985. Under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure—so as not to alienate her fans—she works an erotic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, with Beauty becoming the willing submissive of the Prince who awakens her. The three books—
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment
, and
Beauty's Release
—are generally regarded as excellent erotic lit. All three have now been issued under Rice's real name and are easily available.

Also easy to obtain are the two erotic novels Rice originally wrote under the pseudonym Ann Rampling.
Belinda
is really mislabeled as erotic, since there's almost no onstage sex, but Rice does venture into forbidden territory with this story of the love affair between a man and a slightly underage girl.
Exit to Eden
is literate SM that was all but ruined by Hollywood. The portions of the film that are faithful to the book are quite good, and seeing this love story between a dominant woman and her male slave is pretty radical. Too radical for the studio execs, who ham-fistedly inserted a hackneyed detective plot featuring Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd, so as not to frighten the proles too much with all the whips and chains. The film would be much better if some rogue videographer would make an unauthorized edit—
a la The Phantom Menace
—in which all the detective scenes are left on the cutting room floor like the trash that they are.

11
    
12

Pornucopia
and
The Magical Fart
by Piers Anthony

Certainly one of the most prolific writers of SF and fantasy, Anthony has written many series, including
Xanth
, which now includes almost 30 volumes. A lot of his novels are tinged with playful T&A, but he went balls-out in a couple of his books.
Pornucopia
was originally written for Playboy Press, but they rejected it as “too gross for words.” They were probably expecting mainstream porn in sci-fi clothing and had to pick their jaws off the floor after reading this insanely imaginative, explicit novel, which somehow manages to retain the humor and lightheartedness of the
Xanth
works.

The plot revolves around Prior Gross, who has an uncircumcised dick that measures 3.97 inches when erect. As it turns out, the smegma that Prior's penis produces has curative properties, and this makes his organ the target of an abduction by the beautiful doctor Tantamount Emdee. The rest of the novel focuses on Prior's attempts to regain his pilfered gland. Anthony has commented that when writing this book, he tried to break every taboo he could think of, even those of the erotic publishing industry itself. Indeed,
Pornucopia
brazenly ventures into such
verboten
areas as smegma, VD, small penis size, bestiality, circumcision, tampon insertion, and a three-pronged prosthetic penis(?!):

Oubliette got on her hands and knees again and presented her handsome posterior. “Stations, men,” she said.

Seeing her there, Prior finally realized what this weird divided member was for. The two small penises lifted as his hot blood filled them.

He came at her as he had the prior night, but with a difference. He had three members to insert. The long one passed between her legs and curved by her falling breasts to reach her mouth. The two lesser ones prodded simultaneously at her vagina and anus.

It was tricky getting them aligned, but with patience and steady nerves, he made it.

The
Magic Fart
catches up with Prior a year after recovering his cock. A succubus tells him that his dream woman—the one he's destined to marry—has been abducted to Fartingale, and he has one week to rescue her. As you may have surmised by now, this sequel adds a record amount of toilet humor to the mix, in the time-honored literary tradition of Chaucer, Rabelais, Swift, Twain, and Benjamin Franklin.

In the land of Fartingale, people break wind as a greeting, make their buildings out of dried shit, engage in literal pissing contests, and community life centers around a gigantic central public bathroom (the homes in Fartingale have no private loos). Eliminatory functions and sexual functions are entwined. As a female character tells Prior while seducing him: “Folks who poop together, whoop together. We have shared shit.”

Honorable Mention 1: Two speeches by Mark Twain

Twain's love of tweaking convention shows up most strongly in some of his rarer writings on religion, farting, and sex. In the latter category we find his speech “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” in which he devilishly propounds on masturbation:

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence.

Scarcer still is his speech “The Mammoth Cod Club,” in which he gives several facetious reasons why he won't join. The fourth one being:

Largeness of organ is proof positive that it has been cultivated. The blacksmith gets an enormous arm by constantly exercising that limb, and I suppose a man by constantly using his private member will increase the size of it. Membership in your Society is a confession of immorality.

Honorable Mention 2: The love letters of James Joyce

Literary giant James Joyce destroyed and redefined every notion of what a novel could be with his stream-of-consciousness masterworks
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake.
Joyce wasn't just an experimentalist on paper, though. He was pretty kinky in the sack. Although his works stirred up trouble because of some racy passages, it's his letters to his common-law wife Nora Barnacle that are downright filthy. So filthy, in fact, that Joyce's literary estate has sworn that they will never again be published. But they
were
published around 40 ago in
The Selected Letters of James Joyce.
If you can get your hands on a copy, you'll read things like “my dirty little fuckbird!” “pull out my mickey and suck it like a teat,” “I would love to be whipped by you,” “the heavy smell of your behind,” and “a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers.” Yep, Joyce reveled in the sound and smell of Nora's farts and turds. “I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere,” he wrote on December 8, 1909. “I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

On December 2, 1909, he explained to Nora the twin feelings of love that he has for her—the spiritual side and the earthy, physical side:

It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tales with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in my behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.

These gloriously filthy, unashamed missives are truly some of the best erotic writing I've ever read. Joyce's literary genius, his raging horniness, and his devotion to Nora are a combination that can never be beat. It's a crying shame that his heirs now deprive the world of such high-caliber smut.

Honorable Mention 3: “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” by Larry Niven

Like Philip José Farmer and Piers Anthony, Niven is another name familiar to SF fans. Winner of five Hugos and one Nebula, his crowning creation is the
Ringworld
series. In his 1971 essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” he meditates on the problems that Superman and “a human woman designated LL” would have if they tried to make a kid. One of the problems is that Superman might kill LL while spasming during orgasm. Even if that didn't happen, “he'd blow off the top of her head. Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a kryptonian. But with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet.”

Niven suggests artificial insemination, but this too presents challenges. Superman's supersperm would be unstoppable: “A thickened cell wall won't stop them. They will
all
enter the egg, obliterating it entirely in an orgy of microscopic gang rape.” But they won't stop there; all several billion of them will travel outside of LL's body and fly around Metropolis, causing all kinds of microscopic damage and immaculate conceptions.

Honorable Mention 4: “Sisters” by Lynne Cheney

The novel
Sisters
has become legendary for two reasons. First, it was written by Lynne Cheney, the rigidly uptight fundamentalist wife of oil baron Vice President Dick Cheney. Second, almost no one has ever read it. It was published by New American Library's Canadian division in 1981, and almost instantly went out of print. You simply cannot find a copy, even among rare book dealers.

Consequently, rumors about its contents swirl. For instance, legend has it that
Sisters
contains lesbian action. Having read it, I can tell you that this isn't correct. The misunderstanding stems from the fact that the main character's sister, dead by the time the novel starts, was a lesbian. Just like the Cheneys' daughter Mary.

Sisters
is thought of as a romance novel, but that's a misnomer. Although it was packaged as one, it's more correct to call it a Western mystery novel. In 1886, successful Sophie, the New York publisher of
Dymond's Ladies Magazine
, goes to Wyoming to find out why her sister died. Independent and intelligent, Sophie carries with her a little lacquer box filled with contraceptives. Goodness gracious!

There's only one sex scene—if you can even call it that—in the whole book. When Sophie can no longer resist the studly James Stevenson, she joins him in the library room after hours:

He turned to her, leaned down, and put his hand gently on the side of her face. “You are extraordinarily beautiful,” he said quietly. They kissed, and then she lay with him in the firelight, unmindful of the past, unmindful of anything except this moment, this man, and herself.

That's how the chapter ends. When the next one starts, it's the following morning. The scene of attempted rape, on the other hand, is much longer and more detailed (which gives us some psychological insight into Lynne). Sophie is attacked by a drunken homesteader in his shack:

He let his thick, blunt fingers slide down to her throat, then over the front of her dress, over her breast and down until his hand rested on her thigh….

He kissed her, forced her lips open with his mouth. She could taste the whiskey he had been drinking, feel his whiskers and the scab on his face. A wave of revulsion swept over her, and she pushed him away. As he fell back, the white bulldog moved toward her, his growl becoming louder.

“Ah, feisty, ain't she, Luper?” Wilson stroked the dog. “Well, sometimes that kind's the most fun.”

The scene goes on for another page, ending when Wilson passes out before he can complete the attack. His abused wife had spiked his whiskey.

Besides the sex, rape, lesbianism, and contraception,
Sisters
also contains disfiguring violence, animal cruelty, feminist thought, anti-corporate messages, and several instances of taking the Lord's name in vain. What would Jesus say? What would
Dick
say?

 

Lest we forget that erotic books didn't start with the stroke novels of the 1960s, or in the 1930s with Henry Miller, or even with the underground novels of the Victorians, here are some explicit pre-1800 tomes, many of which are still in print in some form or another.

1

Sonnets Lussuriosi
by Pietro Aretino (1524)

After checking out sexual drawings by Giuliano Romano, who studied under Raphael and was named as his artistic heir, Pietro Aretino—an Italian satirist whose wit was the scourge of princes and popes—was inspired to put pen to paper. He wrote nasty sonnets based on the sexual maneuvers, one of which included the lines:

Forced to lean on my arms and legs, O curse you for this clumsy position. A mule would conk over after an hour of it.

This collection of sonnets is sometimes named as the first erotic book in the Western world, though this isn't true. (Pope Pius II's
Historia de duobus amantibus
appeared around 1488, and even that may not be the oldest.) Nevertheless, published way back in 1524, it's undoubtedly one of the earliest.

2

Ching P'Ing Mei
by Wang Shih-chêng (circa 1560)

A Chinese classic, this novel has appeared in a large number of faithful and bastardized English translations, including
House of Joy, The Golden Lotus
, and
The Plum in the Golden Vase.

3

Jou Pu Tuan
[
The Prayer Mat of Flesh
] by Li Yu (1634)

4

Satyra Sotadica
by Nicholas Chorier (circa 1660)

First appeared in Latin around 1660, with a French edition
(L'Academie des Dames)
20 years later. An English translation—originally titled
The Duel
—showed up in 1688.
The Encyclopedia of Censorship
calls it “the earliest surviving piece of prose pornography in England.” In it, Tullia initiates her 15-year-old cousin Ottavia into all manner of sexual deviancy.

5

Dialogues of Luisa Sigea
by Nicolas Chorier (circa 1660)

6

La Galante hermaphrodite
by Francois Chavigny de la Bretonniere (1683)

Adding to the book's frisson, the author was a defrocked monk.

7

Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery
by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1684)

A proto-Sadean play featuring characters named Cuntigratia, Fuckadilla, and Buggeranthos.

8

A Lady of Quality
by Crebillon le Fils (Claude-Prosper Jolyot) (1700s)

9

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
by John Cleland (1748)

Fanny Hill
—as it is better known—”has the dubious distinction of being the most prosecuted literary work in history,” says
The Encyclopedia of Censorship.
It was the subject of trials as late as the 1960s, well over two centuries after it appeared. The US Supreme Court overturned a ban in 1966, but it remains technically outlawed in the UK, although it's widely available.

10

Felicia
by Andre-Robert Andrea de Nerciat (1775)

11

Justine
by the Marquis de Sade (1791)

12

Juliette
by the Marquis de Sade (1798)