Erotica is in the eye of the beholder

Going back to my musings on erotic writings that have been important to me, in the order that I read them, next on the list would be the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.    These were books written by Anne Rice under the pen name A.N. Roquelaire -- although by the time I found them the title proclaimed they were written by "Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaire."  (Rice was at the height of her fame for her vampire novels at the time.)

These books were so hot that when I innocently picked one up from the general fiction section of the Barnes & Noble where I spent most of my lunch breaks at the time (the early 1990's) and started thumbing through it, I literally dropped it on the floor. 

The trilogy reimagines Sleeping Beauty as a naked sex slave in a kingdom of naked sex slaves.  (If you've read my novel, Mindgames, you know that naked sex slaves are my thing, so . . . .)  It is slight of plot and characterization, but it is oh so pretty.  Beauty is a sweet, innocent masochist who is turned on by humiliation, and by being spanked, and by sultry stories her friends tell her of being anally penetrated by a carrot.  Beauty stands for all of us. 

Notice I am writing of the trilogy and not of the quartet.  Rice published a fourth book, Beauty's Kingdom, in 2016.  It has none of the courage of the first three books, and is overall a plodding, politically correct read.  Beauty comes back to the sex slave kingdom twenty years after leaving (I think she had been kicked out for being too horny, or something), takes over, and declares that from now on all sex slavery must be consensual.  Yay?  Luckily there are plenty of beautiful young submissives who flock to the chance to be dominated, but I don't remember any of them or anything that happened to them -- because it wasn't hot.  A bunch of people had sex and liked it.  More power to them, but I don't need to read their stories.