Making the President

Carol Flinders

In the world of adult novels, Olympia Press has always marketed itself as the patrician press, the guys who publish the novels you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen reading on the train. No lurid covers, pseudonyms that don’t immediately put one in mind of sex, and titles that do the same. What’s inside, however, is just plain more of the same. Adult novels are, for the most part, a fill-in-the-blank affair. Female protagonist usually. Extra points if she’s innocent at the beginning of the book and becomes insatiable within the first ten pages. Increasingly debased encounters, culminating in the anticlimactic climax, whatever that may be, that has stopped our young lovely from reaching complete fulfillment. Oddly, one would think that given such a strict format, there would be nowhere to go but up. How sadly one would be mistaken.

Making the President stands out from the usual run of brainless sex novels by its ability to offend. Not with the sex itself; anyone who’s read more than two sex novels is likely to encounter most of what’s here. For that matter, a couple of harder romances would do that trick. But our pseudonymous author here (who cannot but be male, given some of the terminology used) uses, as that particular climax, an interracial encounter described in such thoroughly debasing terms that one wonders if the novel weren’t written by a white power survivalist looking for a quick buck to fund his next weapons purchase.

Someday I will actually find a decent adult novel. But it occurs to me that if I keep buying them at library book sales, that probably won’t happen. After all, I expect people keep the decent ones.