My mom will go to estate sales and yard sales and buy boxes of books without even checking the box. These boxes end up in a storage building collecting dust. Earlier today I was getting some of my stuff out of the storage building and I noticed the cover of one book that had fallen on the floor. Here’s the cover.
The nearly naked men caught my attention, so I read the back cover. Here’s the blurb:
This book was first published in 1966 in England. It was published in 1972 in the U.S.
I think it’s some kind of freaky coincidence that a homoerotic novel is lying in clear view on the floor of my very homophobic mother’s storage building for me to find.
So, has anyone read it? Should I bother? Was it fate that I found it?
Never read the book you mention, but I read some other stuff written by the same authors - Rogue Roman - and it is pretty dreadful.
There were a slew of “passion on the plantation” fiction from the same authors, which leaned pretty heavily on inter-racial sex. I can’t remember the names of any except Drum - about a man sold into slavery in Africa (he was the rightful heir to the kingship of some tribe or something) and then transported to Cuba. Then he is seduced by a white woman, she gets pregnant and he is flogged to death and she moves to New Orleans and her son becomes a bare-knuckle prize-fighter (he is taught by Tom Cribb, who really was heavyweight champion of England under London Prize Ring rules). Then he gets stabbed to death by his best friend, and his son is sold to a plantation that features in most of the other novels.
It is pretty bad stuff. It doesn’t even lend itself well to a tongue-in-cheek reading.
The authors seem to have been ringing the changes on what was considered shocking in the 60s - miscegenation, gay sex, sado-masochism.