Anne Rice Returns to Porn by Mark Judge
How sad. How sad and how terribly dull.
Anne Rice has returned to the porn business. The erstwhile Catholic [now anti-Catholic] and author of the first second-wave vampire novels in the 1970s and 1980s, Rice has republished the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, three books full of repetitive sex, spanking, and S & M. They are based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. It’s pure crap, a quickie cash-in based on the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon, and Rice ought to be ashamed of herself.
The three books, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release, first came out in the 1980s, under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. Take any one of the books and open it to a random page, and you’ll find something like this: “Again she arched her back. Her breasts were suffused with red. As he drove his organ into her, he felt her shudder violently with unwilling pleasure.”
Add spanking to the scene, repeat 847 times, and you have the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. You don’t know repetitive until you’ve read this books. It’s as if Larry Flynt were twelve years old and had ADHD and Tourette’s.
In a new preface, Rice tries to justify republishing these books. It’s the same-old porn-as-liberation boilerplate. “The books aren’t about literal cruelty,” she explains. “They’re about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex.”
Think about that sentence for a few seconds. Ah yes, the fun of being raped. Of course the victim of this, the character Beauty, is set free: “Beauty’s slavery is delicious sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating.” Right.
