What would that have been like, vanilla sex as they call it, in some little hotel room hanging over the Pacific with this wonderfully wholesome Mr. Straight who never dreamed he was sleeping with Miss Lace ‘n’ Leather from the grandest exotic sex club in the world?

I live in Outsider Heaven don’t I? Where all your secret desires can be satisfied, and you are never alone and you are always safe. It’s The Club where I’ve lived all my adult life.

Do you like erotica?

Anne Rice has dabbled in this before and her writing is perfect for this genre. This book had VERY few of those yanked-out-of-scene-ice-shower moments. Bizarrely enough, the few that did happen were completely separate from the erotic moments. I couldn’t always get into the meta-ish “feelings” discussions about the lifestyle (even though they interest me outside of the story). But maybe that’s a testament to the rest of the book. I wanted the hot, feeling-the-feelings moments — not the introspection about what the feelings meant. What a switch from my usual reader mentality.

Other books by Anne Rice:
* Beauty’s Punishment * Anne Rice
* Anne Rice – The Claiming of The Sleeping Beauty

Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

I found the Sleeping Beauty trilogy to be an intense, draw dropping, sometime rage inducing, read; however Exit to Eden seems to be on the opposite spectrum. The book starts out setting high hopes for a steam filled read, with a main character who may actually know what they are doing, and then…nothing. It went from a bondage based book to what can be described as just a romance of two very high-strung confused people, very quickly. Frankly, if I wanted to read a drama based filler of two overly dramatic people, I would just log onto Facebook.

‘There are a thousand reasons why you choose a man or a woman as a love partner, a sex partner, aren’t there? It’s not like it used to be, when the lines were hard to cross.’

‘When a man seeks out violence,’ I said, ‘be it war, sports, adventure; he wants it to be symbolic and most of the time he believes it really is. And then comes that moment when somebody literally puts a gun to your head. And you literally almost die. Then you realize that you’ve been confusing the literal and the symbolic all along. Well, El Salvador is the place where I learned that, Martin. I’m not running from it. It’s merely the reason I’m here. I want violence just as I always have. A sense of danger, Martin. I love it. I think I even want to be annihilated by it all. But I don’t really want to be hurt and I certainly don’t want to die.’

Yes, I would like these, these long, long tight black gloves … And the broad leather belt around my waist cinching me like an exotic girdle, yes, and black silk and the high tight-fitting boots as soon as I could afford them. And finally discovering in a bookstore near the Berkeley campus, in silent disbelief and blushing excitement, that shocking French classic which others must have known for years, looking so innocent in its smooth white book jacket, The Story of O.

This book can be read online here: https://archive.org/details/exittoeden00ramp