Oh, how I love holidays. And on Love’s Holiday, I consider strange love in a memoir, a romance novel, and a comic book about the true Harlequin.
Books
My Father, The Pornographer | Chris Offutt | Washington Square Press | 2016
Anyone can imagine the horror of finding your dad’s porno stash, but what if you find out your dad was secretly a hardcore pornographer? Chris Offutt explores the strange, illusive, and uncomfortable love of his father, the pornographer.
Chris Offutt is not a pornographic genre author but an Iowa Writers Workshop-educated American Literary Regionalist! He’s attuned to those awful, persistent emotions that come from living with erratic parents, the feelings sung about in The Mountain Goats album, Sunset Tree. When he calls his dad to share the good news that he sold a short story collection, his father sadly replies, “I’m sorry I gave you such a terrible childhood that you became an author.”
His father is indeed an odd one. Andrew Offutt wrote over 500 books with seventeen pen names. Almost all of his work is pornographic. Science fiction, fantasy, and erotic of every possible genre, virtually all of his work was sexually charged. He published a multi-book series of SF erotic with Playboy, a historical erotic romance with major publishers. Almost all of Andrew Offutt’s work is obscure or out of print today. He died resenting the literary establishment and even his son for finding literary success. The Offutt family personified the literary/genre divide.
The author recalls his childhood in Kentucky. A. Offutt ruled the house like a tyrannical shut-in, subjugating his wife and children into taking care of every household chore and locking himself in his office to write for 14 hours a day and churn out at least a book a month. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t fit into his Kentucky community. Chris Offutt cites a dozen people insisting his father was “a character!” He was a NEET in the 1970s. One neighbor described, “He put four kids through college without leaving the house.” He once told someone who lost an arm, “You better shut your mouth, or I’ll rip off the other arm.”
Yet Andrew Offutt was also a respected SF author and a member of the 1960s “New Wave.” His story “For Value Received” was published in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s second, famous anthology (in fact, as toastmaster of the 32nd Worldcon in 1974, he developed a lifelong, one-sided grudge against Ellison). Andrew Offutt used science fiction conventions to build a surrogate family and have strange sex. He and his wife participated in couples swapping. At cons, they completely neglected the children, leaving them alone in a hotel room with bread and Kraft singles. Strange stuff happens at Worldcon, man.
Offutt obsessively chronicles his father’s life and papers: his abusive letters to his family, his furious correspondence with authors and agents, his client list, and decades-long correspondence with bondage fetishists, who commissioned private porn for thousands of dollars. He looked at so much pornography it messed with his mind. He couldn’t feel attraction while immersed in his father’s archives.
The strangest thing C. Offutt finds: a 4000-page comic of drawn sexualized torture. A. Offutt tried to stop. He tried to throw all his terrible drawings into a river. But he could not stop. Drawing these things was a compulsion, or perhaps a release, as it seems all day Andrew Offutt thought about torture and murder.
How does one love a parent that acts this way? A relapsed and resentful Catholic with an alcohol dependency, intense pornography addiction, severe delusions of mania, guilt, self-loathing, a persecution complex, and no nurturing instinct. Andrew Offutt had his demons but never dealt with them. I’d argue constantly immersing himself in pornography made all of his problems worse. How could anyone be expected to love this person?
And yet, throughout the book, Chris Offutt explains how he did love his dad. And for many years, he wanted him to love him back, but he didn’t know how. A. Offutt’s fans adored him, bringing him strange gifts and buying his work, enabling this strange lifestyle. And his wife was loyally devoted to her husband. She loved a man who truly hated women, saw them as inferior, and struggled to repress violent urges.
Today, erotic writing is more popular than it’s ever been. Worldcon keeps generating more controversy, and most of the 60s New Wave all turned out to be weirdo Republicans. All Chris Offutt has with his father’s papers a lifetime of trauma and an excellent memoir. I highly recommend this book, and it’s on Hoopla.
While reading, I kept thinking of that Mountain Goats lyric,
“Some things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun
But the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.”
Heartbreak Incorporated | Alex De Campi | Solaris Nova | 2021
The state sees marriage as a financial contract, a business. And when billionaires get married, that’s big business! So, who do the billionaires hire when they cook up a Marriage and Acquisition scam? Say you wanna marry an heiress and steal all her money? Who do you call? Heartbreak Incorporated.
A romance of many sub-genres. It’s a girl living in New York trying to make it as a writer, an enemy’s to lovers romance, a murder mystery, a spy plot!
It starts with Evie, our hapless protagonist, trying to make ends meet in New York. She got a journalism degree for a job that doesn’t exist anymore. She wants to break a big story but can’t bear the thought of hurting her sources. So when she interviews to be a secretary for the love interest and most handsome and fascinating man in New York, everything changes.
It’s an atypical Billionaire Romance love interest, Mishka, a Georgian who left Russia after the fall of the USSR and made his fortune in New York. He seduces people for a living, and his job is a mix of a divorce attorney, private investigator, gigolo, and sexual blackmailer. So yes, of course, he’s also ripped and hot. Then, about midway through, something crazy happens that makes this a paranormal romance, too! I can’t spoil it.
There’s a lot to love about this book. I liked how we always see the darker side of wealth: the plots and scheming, the backstabbing and betrayal. Of course, rich people pay someone to break up their unwanted marriages! And it turns out it’s the perfect premise for a multi-genre romance.
Check out Alex de Campi’s second novel if you love her comics. It was re-released today by Solaris Nova. Thanks, Solaris Nova and Netgalley, for the review copy.
Comics
Harlequin Valentine | Neil Gaiman (Words), John Bolton (Art) | Dark Horse | 2001
It’s the most Neil Gaiman urban fantasy story ever that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day. What if Harlequin, the wacky clown from the Comedia D’el Arte, nailed his heart to your door?
Gaiman’s tale personifies the Harlequin, a mischievous, devil demon theater troupe from 1263. He teams up with John Bolton, the artist on Books of Magic, to tell the tale with a strange art style. Sometimes photorealistic, sometimes abstract, some panels almost reminded me of AI-generated art in a cool way.
Harlequin finds his Columbina, a London woman with a pixie cut and a leather trenchcoat. He haunts her on Valentine’s Day when the stars align, and he’s most likely to appear.
Until, like all Gaiman stories, our hero realizes we are just floating through a world of endless signifiers that can mean anything so that we can define their meaning and wear the costumes, too. And she becomes Harlequin.
The archetype of Harlequin lives on in the 21st century. The most prolific and popular romance publisher, Harlequin Romance, pays tribute to the imp. Just as the English remixed Harlequin and paired her with Clown, DC Comics remixed her into Harley Quinn, the Clown Prince of Crime’s sidekick. In Suicide Squad, Harley acts like this character who dates back to the 13th century, a zany, loopy, silly court jester in love.
Gaiman and Bolton’s story is short and entertaining, with a helpful literary history lesson. It’s available on Hoopla, and I recommend it!
Pile of the Week
Every year near my apartment, people come outside and sell piles of teddy bears on the sidewalk. I’ve never seen anyone buy one. If I were rich, I’d buy them all.
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