The Pain Lusters by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Idle Hour Books #492, 1966)

Well, I know, I have been away from updating this blog for quite a while; I will try to get back into the game. And getting back into it, let’s start with a nifty later Don Elliott/Silverberg, The Pain Lusters.

The set-up is similar to the Loren Beauchamp Another Night, Another Love (which I discussed almost three years ago here): an out-of-work actor in his late 20s, Nick, his TV and stage days slowing fading, needs money, and is approached by an old acting pal who recruits him for male prostitution: in Another, it is loving up rich older women at a resort; in The Pain Lusters, it is beating up rich older women with a taste for pain in an outskirts NYC mansion that caters to the wealthy and sexually weird.

Nick slowly gets into the job — he has to audition for the madame, of course (the girlfriend of his pal), and learn the finer points of BDSM (L.T. Woodward, Silverberg’s doctorly pen name, provides a sort of preface, taken from Sex Fiend)…the men and women of the pain mansion, we find, are not mere mindless, soulless whores, but people with lost dreams and future hopes, each in need of finding love as any human.

All seems to go well until one wealthy woman, Carolyn, comes to the mansion seeking to re-experience a rape she endured three years ago, when a burglar broke in while her husband was away and ravished her by force; she claims it is the only time in her life that she had multiple orgasms and felt alive (and as any real psychosexual researcher will tell you, there are these instances, fueled by the forced ravishings of romance novels). When Carolyn’s husband gets wind of his wife’s secret desires, he stakes out the mansion, gains entry, and causes all hell to break loose…

I was possibly looking for a connection to this book with Silverberg’s 1963 story, “The Pain Peddlers,” but there was none…in that SF story, people tune into pain TV with neuro-headsets to experience operations without anesthetic vicariously — the virtually feel the pain the patient goes through when opened up or having a limb cut off; this need for true pain revealing the numbness of existence that a future society (and perhaps now) falls into it.

Then again, maybe there is a connection here: the characters in this softcore title do indeed seek out pain to remind themselves they are real and alive; or in the case of the burglar-rapist re-enactment, to return to a memory of sexual heights that normal society would find deviant.

Silverber’s post-1964 Don Elliotts seem to lean toward S/M and the desire of pain, to give and receive (Black Market Shame, Sin Kill, Sin Warped) , something also noticed in his later 60s-early 70s SF: Thorns, for instance, about two people in great pain, which is pretty much a novelization of “Flies,” The Man in the Maze and The Second Trip…

Recommended: Submissive Games for Tender Trollops by Valerie Gray (Ophelia Press, 2010)

Lesbian BDSM tales by Valerie Gray.  Done in a way that it reminds one of Sloane Britain.

69 Barrow Street – Sheldon Lord aka Lawrence Block (Midwood #24, 1959)

This Paul Rader cover is the first of his lesbian couples, which he did many more, most of them quite stunning.  Rader seemed to tackle the cover for most of the Sheldon Lords, but not always the reprints…

Another Lawrence Block tale set in Greenwich Village, his favorite setting for his sleaze books, and where he (still does?) live.  The building at 69 Barrow Street also appears in Passion Alley by Andrew Shaw.

This one is somewhat soap opera-esque about the love and sex woes of hipstes in the Village.  Ralph is a painter who lives with a somewhat wild and nutty lesbian, Stella.  Ralph sets his eyes on a new tenant, Susan Rivers, and so does Stella.

Ralph is looking for love but Stella just wants another woman to fuck, and she has a long list of them.  Susan, however is a recent lesbian the past two years, six lovers and no more interest in men.  So she fears Ralph’s interest, but she poses for him for a painting on the condition they are just friends. Of course, he slowly falls in love with her.

There’s a great reefer madness party Stella throws for 1 people where they all get high and have various sexual connections. One girl, Maria, keeps asking every man do do it “Greek style” with her but no one wants to. When Ralph asks her if it hurts she says she wants the pain.  Some BDSM and D/s comes into play here as Maria moves in and becomes Stella’s “bad girl.”  Maria calls Stella Mummy and Stella gets her kicks from punishing and spanking Maria.

Pretty bold  for a 1959 novel.  But like many lesbian themes books back then, the dykes had to be portrayed as deviant and disturbed, so Maria soon lapses into insanity with the D/s mommy/bad girl game, and Stella becomes homicidal-maniac jealous of Susan and Ralph.

There’s also rape in the book — a lesbian rape, and a drunken moment when Ralph attacks Stella when she taunts him about her making love to Susan, and he rapes his friend.

The novel falls into strange violence at the end like some of Block’s Andrew Shaw Nightstands tend to do.

Overall, a decent Sheldon Lord, but not in the same ball park of greatness like Candy, The Sex Shuffle, or  A Strange Kind of Love.

Recommended: Splendor in the Dorm Room by Sandra Boise

Olympia Press has published a nifty lesbian D/s novella, Splendor in the Dorm Room by Sandra Boise.

Recommneded.

Kindle here.

Sadism by L.T Woodward (FULL TEXT)

In the human soul, cruelty crouches like a beast, chained, but eager to spring.

—WlLHELM STEKEL

WE DO NOT live in a gentle society. The daily newspapers provide a record of atrocity and violence that will someday appall and terrify the historians of the future, if there is any future. Day by day the grim toll mounts: children maimed at the hands of their angry parents, frightened girls raped in dark alleys, helpless victims hideously mutilated by knife-wielding madmen. The impulse toward acts or cruelty runs like a dark ribbon through the shining surface of our affluent society.

We find cruelty everywhere, at the highest levels of society and at the lowest. The conversation at a fashionable dinner table is edged with razor-keen blades, designed to wound deeply; the nation’s sports fans pay millions of dollars a year to watch men batter each other into insensibility in the boxing ring or on the football gridiron; prisoners are interrogated with frightful ferocity in hundreds of police stations. The television screen is bright with the violent doings of detectives and criminals who rival one another in the ability to do damage. Our popular fiction is repetitiously full of scenes of whipping, torture, beating, and the more refined forms of unpleasantness.