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"Layers" by Stroker Ace (mental sex games). Gandmar: 10, 10+, 10+
"Layers" by Stroker Ace (John Dark Repost). Guest Review by Mary Jorsay Gandmar (maryjg@finebody.com). No ambivalence about my reactions to this one. It's gripping writing, smooth, clean and effortless, literate and very au courant. It is a riveting, mesmerizing story of the most terrible and invidious form of torture - the warping and twisting of a mind, a personality, the very essence of a human being. High sophistication, a singularly appropriate title, fluent prose, vividly realized narrative are all superbly held together by the metaphor that anchors the tale - the loving, persistent, tedious, yet ultimately gratifying business of scraping a classic car down to its bare metal (read mettle) and then re- building its colour and texture and form by hand, layer by layer, till it is, finally, exactly what you want, an object of abiding pleasure. And this is just what is done to the lady in the story, the author's lover. She is destroyed, stripped, literally, figuratively, emotionally, psychologically, and then rebuilt, reconditioned for only one purpose – to give pleasure. Perhaps the only weakness in this metaphor is the opening paragraph itself, the Introduction, which tells us about the car-scraping and the lady and immediately draws the metaphor. That robs the story of much subtlety. Take away the first paragraph, leave the metaphor understated and you have a really powerful narrative. Powerful is an injustice. Savage might be more appropriate. What can be more terrible than the conscious, deliberate destruction of a mind only to remold it into a form more sexually compliant and pleasurable to oneself? But the metaphor goes far, far beyond the mirroring of car and woman. It works at a number of levels (again ... layers ...) - one sees the difference in the relationship between author and lover at the start of the story (she is tough, aggressive, knows her mind), and its metamorphosis at the end. How this happens and who does it is another set of layers ... another couple, another woman, another man, the man similarly tearing down and rebuilding his own creature, his own creation, a woman he has bought in a country that is itself being torn down and rebuilt (more layers ...) into something someone else finds acceptable. This man, not quite evil, but almost, himself complex, deeply layered, capable of molding relationships and people but, imperceptibly, though he claims to the contrary, changing with every change he makes to another. Above all, this is a vicious attack on our society today - a society that is so befuddled at its heart and core that it allows humans to be bought and sold, compels this in fact by forcing inhumanity on humans; a society so demented and depraved that it allows enormous wealth to co-exist with abject poverty; sophistication with perversion, beauty with ugliness; a society that views fundamental inequities with tragic indifference and reduces human beings to numbers and playthings. This is fin-de-siecle Frankensteinism, an awful, brutal and telling comment on the horrors of our time. And yet it is deeply caring, at yet another layer. There is a real sadness here, I think, as the author tells us this tale and seems to say - see, see what we were and what we have become, what we have made ourselves become, what we have let ourselves become. 'Layers' is that rarity - a truly intelligent, creative work that could, possibly, change the way you look at things, people, sex, sexuality, sensuality. It's not porn. It's not even really erotica. It deserves the widest of audiences. Ratings for "Layers" Athena (Technical Quality) : 10 Venus (Plot & Character) : 10+ Mary (Appeal to reviewer) : 10 + |