Horn of Desire.

Book Review:

Unicorn: Horn of Desire: Unicorn Pleasures Book 1

We live in strange times, or so said Plato - sort of - and he didn’t even live long enough to know the Bermuda Triangle, the internet, or The Ovipositor (which if you are unfamiliar with, please do not Google, or, at least, remember later that I warned you). If you’re like me then you probably consider the Greeks to be kind of charmingly quaint. The way a teenager girl thinks of her grandfather’s dating advice. So, on your behalf dear reader, I went looking for some strange. Something we can stuff in our knapsacks before climbing into the Wayback machine, something we can wave in Plato’s face as we say, “So you think that you lived in strange times?”

So what are we shoving into our knapsacks (that BTW, sounds dirty enough to be a crude euphemism, but I checked Urban Dictionary and it is not)? I’ll give you a hint: I hope you like unicorns - like - really like unicorns.

So here is how we got to unicorns: A Methodology.

We all know that the combination of cost-free e-publishing and internet anonymity has given rise to an entire Amazon digital distribution center of writing too lowbrow to be embraced even by those who make a game out of embracing the lowbrow, which is to say that we simply assume the writing is bad. And yet, people buy this stuff. Case in point, crime thriller author Mark Dawson has sold of 300,000 e-books in his series about the assassin named John Milton. This is actually a great example of what is going on out there: “John Milton” is of course a cutesy nod at John “Paradise Lost” Milton, which is an acute enough reference that even your uncle who didn’t finish high school can get it and say, “Hey, I understand that this is a reference to something else!” The elitist in me wants to say that this is sort of intertextuality for dummies. It is a way of plugging the intellectual parking meter.

So get this: our book dear reader, is called Unicorn: Horn of Desire: Unicorn Pleasures Book 1 written by Cecilia Chase, which is not her real name. Guess what this book is about. I dare you.

As for plugging the meter (which it turns out is also not a euphemism) the opening scene of the book takes place on a warm summer day in a barn on the ranch where our narrator Serena works with her “cherry bomb” best friend Mo. The girls are helping ranch owner Mr. Fullerton and fit, blonde, former rodeo champion ranch hand Brett Nilson to collect semen from a horse by using what is called a “phantom mare”, which is basically a sort of barrel the horse is coaxed into fucking. Serena ends up inside the phantom mare holding the jug into which the horse is furiously ejaculating. This, dear reader, is to be understood as a guiding metaphor. If you somehow miss that, I’m sure the author will send a telegraph to your house which will read: HOW DID YOU MISS THAT? STOP.

The book behaves as one would expect from a standard Harlequin romance, and yet also manages to be unexpected. When Serena observes Mo and Brett having sex in a hayloft, the latter surprises the former with an uninvited foray into anal sex, which of course Mo discovers that she loves. When Serena masterbates, it isn’t enough that she simply masterbate, but rather that she has to completely fist herself in order to reach orgasm. There is a sort of psychosexual bar being moved here. Or rather, Horn of Desire is participating in a bar moving that is already taking place in our culture. Here I will make the obligatory mention of Fifty Shades of Grey, itself originally published as an ebook and originally conceived of as dirty Twilight fanfiction. That’s not the only thing though; I think that for the generation raised on reading Harry Potter novels, one can draw a straight line to Harry’s lackluster successor Twilight, on to Fifty Shades of Grey and straight on to the weirdly rapey porn work of James Deen and to the “monster erotica” of which Horn of Desire is a kind. There are other kinds, in case you’re curious. Christine Simms (not her real name) writes a series of books about women (usually abducted women) having ravishing sexual relations with various types of dinosaurs. Her book Taken by the Pterodactyl includes a scene where the virgin protagonist is aroused by the tenderness with which the creature pecks off her clothes.

It is easy to chuckle at all of this, but it just may be that there is a larger question here and one which Plato is sure to ask us: What the fuck is going on here?

There are two things here worth noting.

The first: Chase’s writing in Horn of Desire is fine. It isn’t great, but she does what she needs to do. The book functions. Characters have traits. The unicorn is described. It all functions, and more than just that, Chase is always winking at her audience. She knows why they are reading this thing. She knows that we are all living our lives in a world where actual beastiality is - let’s say - generally considered unerotic, but that at the same time people will shell out in excess of $150 for a Bad Dragon dildo (again, don’t blame me if you Google that). Chase knows that she is threading the needle and her readers know it too. While the writing in Horn of Desire may lack some tension, there is still tension. These books are high-wire acts because it would be so easy for the “erotic” to tip over into the “that’s fucking disgusting” and that tension is part of their joy.

The second: If we consider what Steve Erickson wrote in Amnesiascope about how “sex is the last subversive act”, and we consider a mainstream publishing industry which may have contracted to such a degree that it simply can’t afford to be truly subversive, then maybe - just maybe - what we are seeing in these weird texts being written and read in the shadowy literary hinterlands of digital publishing is something akin to Obi-Wan Kenobi hiding out in the deserts of Tatooine, far enough from the madding crowd that he can do what he wants without anyone killing him. As much as it will pain me to have to explain this to Plato, there is some value in the works of our culture that simply aspire to be what they are, rather than to be winners of the Man Booker Prize.

I suppose that there is a third thing to consider …

The third: it is also possible that some people just like to get off on reading relatively high-quality erotica about hot interspecies action. And so, you know, Plato shrugs, whatever.  

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