LN Bey was a reader of erotica long before taking up the pen to write debut novel Blue. Attracted to the ‘inherent illogicality of BDSM’, as LN puts it, ‘the desire to be beaten, controlled and humiliated (or to do the beating) despite it making no logical sense’, Blue is a quest story, with a darkly twisted heart.

LN is adamant that what we read and erotically fantasize doesn’t always bear reflection in what we’d want to experience in real life. In fiction, in our imagination, we’re free, if we choose, to embrace situations we’d find too extreme, too distasteful or, even, too disturbing, in reality.

Speaking of early influences, LN explains, “My interest in BDSM is innate. I found power differentials and half-undressed perils interesting long before I had any idea how sex actually worked. Among the earliest things I read that were overtly sexual, and thrilled me to my core, were a couple of stories in mainstream porn magazines from a friend’s parent’s or older brother’s collection, I forget exactly. One was in an early-1980s Hustler, I believe, and was a very odd thing to find there: a story about a fem-dom slave auction, a dominatrix on stage, one man after another brought out, hurt, and humiliated, before being sold. It certainly got my interest.”

Much later, LN read Roquelaure’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, then Réage’s Story of O, Antoniou’s Marketplace series and Weatherfield’s Carrie novels. LN explains, “Although the styles (and intentions) of these four women authors differ radically, they each have a definite sense of erotic cruelty—consensual, yes, but often ‘consensual non-consent’. It’s about how the characters deal with the system they’ve agreed to enter. There is love, or something like it, in these books, but desire, and the drive to keep going, to keep pushing oneself, is the bigger theme.”

As LN explains, these novels explore total ‘erotic fantasy’ immersion (in particular, into situations which would be too strict for anyone to seek out in reality). Rather than promoting the safe, sane, and consensual in fiction, these novels embrace extremes, so that the ‘fantasy’ exists firmly in the imagination, rather than being a fantasy which the reader might choose to act out.

“Sometimes referred to as ‘chateau porn’ (but what I’ve always called ‘institutional porn’),” says LN, “They’re full of wealthy people, and take place in worldwide organizations that trade and train voluntary sex slaves, or variants thereof: Roquelaure’s world is a conquering castle; Réage’s a more local wealthy club. We follow entry into a whole new world, not just a new relationship.”

The dedication in Blue reads: ‘…to the four women who have cost me countless hours of sleep but showed me how fun it could be to put entire worlds, and all the filthy things that go on within them, down on paper: Molly Weatherfield, Laura Antoniou, A. N. Roquelaure and Pauline Réage.’ It is these women writers who, foremost, inspire LN Bey’s erotic fiction writing although, amusingly, LN admits that the impulse to pen erotica was primarily triggered by an air-freshener commercial!

“A woman is seen busily cleaning her sleek Modernist house, in preparation for a dinner party,” LN explains. “The guests all show up, two couples, and I remember thinking it was a little odd that she was the fifth wheel in this; she had no partner. They all look around, so impressed with her house and the food, but, being an air freshener commercial, they start to sniff the air, and we see the dog on the sofa and the fish frying, and then they all look at her, very disapprovingly. She sort of hangs her head in shame. And every time I saw it I felt this wonderful little tension, because it was obvious, to me at least, that she was going to have to be punished…by the guests!”

“It was the first fiction I’d written since, maybe, high school and I didn’t intend to do anything with it; it was just a hot little fantasy. But it kept bugging me—would this happen, this situation? For it to actually play out, the scene would either be non-consensual, or there would be a reason for all this to happen. I kept thinking about it, and I decided she would have to be ‘in on it’ — she knew beforehand that she’d be punished for infractions, imperfections. It’s what she wanted.”

This became the opening scene of LN Bey’s Blue, where the banality of suburban life meets the seemingly contrary drama of BDSM ‘theatre’.

LN recalls that the first drafts were full of head-hopping and clichés. However, through reading more erotica, taking Rachel Kramer Bussel’s online writing class, and experimenting with short story fiction, LN began to gain confidence, and refine skills.

Precision is a focus for LN, who admires this in Kubrick’s work, where the ‘loving, longing gaze lingers over small details’. As LN notes, Kubrick lingers not only on objects but on people (often using people as objects in his films) and on their conversations.

Of the many erotic artists loved by LN, several are graphic novelists: Crepax, MichaelManning, Eric von Gotha, and Stanton. “These artists create entire worlds, where liberties can be taken with reality, practicality, and consent. I also love it when highly skilled painters apply themselves to erotically themed works. I adore Saturno Buttò. A painter named Roberto Negrón did a fantastic series on B&D behaviors, and there is the work of photographer Araki.”

Other authors admired by LN are Donna Tartt, Thomas Pynchon and Margaret Atwood. Of Pynchon, LN says, “I love the twisty, screwed-up quests, taking unexpected directions, with multiple plotlines. You travel with characters who only briefly cross paths or just miss each other. I love his willingness to have important characters drop out early, and the book is suddenly someone else’s story. Mysteries are slowly uncovered, or added, and his language is incredibly colourful and rhythmic.”

Speaking of Donna Tartt, LN admires her use of minutia to immerse the reader. “So much erotica seems to lacks detail until the sex scenes,” LN regrets, ‘As if they’re taking place on an empty stage with no setting.”

LN is a fan the ‘epic quest’, naming 2001: A Space Odyssey, Excalibur, and Apocalypse Now. “Episodic, segmented, linear but winding, they’re exhausting to the participants, and for the viewer, feeling as if we’ve been right there with them. In comedies such as The Blues Brothers Movie and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the quest explodes into absolute chaos. The latter has multiple quests taking place simultaneously, all inflicting insane, comic violence onto the world. What drives people to such extremes? The goals of these quests are all completely different; it’s the drive that fascinates me.”

“1970s erotic film rules my world: The Image, Story of O, the Tani Naomi films, and The Education of the Baroness. Cheap sexploitation movies,” LN declares. “There was a brief period, before the video format took over, in which ‘porn’ directors made sexually explicit, feature-length films with actual plots and some degree of characterization. They had budgets. They would, in their limited way, attempt to tackle issues: the psychologies of sexual power and submission, with varying degrees of consent (Tani Naomi films = 0 on that scale). They took chances! Considering how we can now find any filthy fetish recorded for the Internet, it’s amazing that such films aren’t made today.”

Read my review of LN Bey’s Blue here

and purchase from Amazon

As her guests arrive for dinner, Janet is both fearful and aroused—because this is no ordinary suburban dinner party. Recently divorced and looking for something new, Janet definitely finds it when her friend Jon invites her to join an exclusive club of kinksters whose initiation is to be the host—and the entertainment.

Before the food is even served, she’s naked and on her knees, not to mention in over her head.

Kinky and sexy, intelligent and perceptive, Blue is both highly entertaining social satire and red hot erotica.

LN has written Blue from a position of knowledge, having been practicing BDSM for decades, in private. Meanwhile, in creating the group dynamics and small-group politics of the kink Scene, LN drew widely on the experiences of close acquaintances. “I’m interested in examining why some of us are attracted to dispensing or receiving the intense stimulations that others would call pain, or submitting our will and body to another (whether within the limits of safewords in real life or without them in erotica, porn, and fantasy).”

Blue’s protagonist, Janet, fears disapproval, and shunning — from her conservative family, her neighbours, and her co-workers. As LN admits, “These are the very things that keep me up at night. She fears being photographed, of there being a record of her perversion. I envy those who can be open about their kinks. Some of us simply cannot, which makes writing this kind of thing (or, rather, publishing this kind of thing) risky, though it is constantly surprising to me that, in this day and age, consensual habits still need to be kept secret.”

 

About LN Bey

LN has lived in various cities and towns throughout the American West and Midwest with spouse and pets in tow, pursuing various creative endeavours and playing interesting games. LN’s debut erotic novel Blue was released in 2016 and the three of five segments of the Villa series are now released. LN also appears in the following anthologies:

Best Bondage Erotica 2015, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Love Slave: Sizzle, 2016, ed. by Dom Exel

No Safewords 2, 2017, ed. by Laura Antoniou.

 

Find LN at lnbey.com and at Viscontipress.com

On Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon