Orgy Maid – Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Pillar Book #838)

Pillar Books (like Ember, Idle Hour, Sundown, Late Library, Leisure, Midnight, et al) was one of William Hamling’s many imprints for Cornith/Greenleaf.  Like the editorially picked titles, and sometimes the pen names, the writers had no idea what imprint the monthly manuscripts would end up with, and what it would be called.

It’s not clear if certain imprints were meant to lean toward the theme and setting of the books — I have noticed that Midnight Books tend to be more crime-noirish, and Embers a little more risque than your average Nightstand.

Pillar often features the slightly altered pen names like Andrew Shole, Dan Eliot, and John Baxter.

Orgy Maid is a bit different than the typical Silverberg Don Elliotts — it’s the first backwoods hillbilly-type tale he’s tackled (usually Silverberg’s are about cheating husbands and wives in the city, crime, the sex lives of urban professionals, young women who find their wanton way to sinful lives as strippers or call girls).  The heroine of the little novel is 12-year-old Lonnie, who becomes a bride and a sex toy for the rich.  The prose style is done in mock southern-porch yarn spinning, with this opening that should b a classic in sleaze fiction:

In the hill country of Tennessee, where Lonnie Garth was born, they have a quaint little folk saying about virginity. “A virgin,” they say, “is a five-year-old girl who can outrun her daddy and her brothers.”

Lonnie was a fast runner. That’s how come her virginity lasted all the way to the age of twelve. (p. 5)

She lives in Holston Mill, population 1,407, and the Holston Family runs all the motels and shops and industry, so all the residents work and rely on the powerful family, who treat them the way nobles treated their serfs: as property.  If a Holston male wanted any girl or woman in town, married, virgin, or wanton, these females have to submit to them or else become ostracized or even killed.

This is why Lonnie’s father has not touched her and his forbade his sons from having sex with her — she’s gorgeous, and he has wanted to keep her a virgin in hopes that one of the Holston boys will take a liking to her and maybe marry her, or keep her as a concubine.

In a town where most girls lose their virginity by age eight from either their fathers, brothers, or a Holston, Lonnie is definitely an oddity.  She feels like she’s missing something since all the girls in her school have been sexually active for several years.

One day, she does catch the eye of a Holston — Tim Holston, the only son sent off to college and who is refined intellectually.  He’s back home on vacation and happens upon young Lonnie swimming naked in the pond.  Mesmerized by her nymphet-allure, he takes her virginity and falls in love with her.

Her father is very pleased she gave herself to a Holston, even more pleased when Tim says he wants to marry her — this means the poor family will have an inn with the Holston Monarchy.

Lonnie and Tim have a two week honeymoon; since she looks seventeen-eighteen rather than twelve, heads don’t turn. Tim’s father had a judge in his pocket who signed a decree that Lonnie could marry as a pre-teen.  They move into the Holston mansion, but soon Lonnie is left alone there when Tim goes back to college. She has a tutor during the day, to finish out her own education, but for the most part her days are idle.  She notices that Tim’s brothers and father sexually abuse the female domestics, like the maid and cook, and these women give in, because they don’t want to lose their good-paying jobs.

It doesn’t take long before the Holston males set their eyes on Tim’s defenseless twelve-year-old bride, alone in her room.  First one brother rapes her, then two of them rape her at the same time — Silverberg makes creative use of evasive words to describe a two-man-one-girl double penetration, and what it feels like for her.

Despite the rape, Lonnie’s body “betrays” her, and she finds she enjoys the forced sex; and wonders if there is something wrong with her for that.

If that isn’t enough, Ted’s sister, her own sister-in-law, makes her lesbian inclinations known to Lonnie.  Lonnie has already been forced to put on a lesbian with one of the maids (hence the title?) and found that she liked the twilight sex, so she gives herself freely to her sister-in-law.

And then one night her father-in-law pays her a visit, so now Lonnie is the sex toy of just about everyone in the house.

To escape the shame and humility, Lonnie hits the bourbon hard, slugging down entire bottles in an hour and passing out.

There is tragedy — at twelve and three months, Lonnie is a bride; at twelve and sex months, she becomes a widow and sexual tigress.

It’s a darn good southern read, and gets an A-minus.