Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors is a novel in two halves, one presenting the adventures and perspectives of a woman, the other those of a man. The reader decides which gender role to play and which paths of the plot to pursue by choosing from a group of "doors." Following the author's suggestions, the reader designs the architecture of this erotic hall of mirrors and is hypnotically drawn into a carnival of decadent delights.
Alina Reyes dissects carnal appetites with delicious wit and wicked imagination and offers a bridge between the parallel worlds of male and female. This erotic tour de force is a brazen and original work that promises its readers a journey like no other.

French erotica goes interactive in this playful, vividly imagined collage of spicy sexual fantasies that allows the reader to choose the sex of the narrator and direct the flow of the action. The excitement begins when the hero or heroine?depending upon which end of the book the reader opens first?happens upon a carnival, wanders into a mysterious caravan through "The Doors of Eros" and learns that a destined mate is also wandering through this labyrinth of lechery. As the two search for one another (through a series of numbered doors corresponding to chapters), each engages in a smorgasbord of lewd adventures. After each experience, the reader is given a choice of doors to open next. None of this is at all politically correct, and the assortment of sex partners includes everything from fat ladies and circus clowns to firemen, jungle animals and hermaphroditic angels. But Reyes (The Butcher, 1995) spins her tale with an improbable delicacy, even when detailing taboo sex acts?and fills her pages with intense dreamlike imagery and quirky symbolism that make her febrile, titillating vision hard to resist. (May) FYI: The Butcher has sold 500,000 copies in France and has been translated into 15 languages.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Smutty meanderings from French porn diva Reyes (The Butcher, 1995), who here badly overestimates the literary freight her train can pull. This time, the ostensible gimmick at hand is that we are given two novels for the price of one, each relating sometimes identical (and always similar) events, one from the male and one from the female point of view. The action begins at a circus sideshow called the Kingdom of Eros, where a man and a woman meet and begin their tryst--which is itself the center and entirety of the plot. At the end of each chapter, the protagonist is left facing several doors, each corresponding to a subsequent chapter in the narrative, and the reader is thus allowed to alter the direction of the story by choosing which door to enter. Despite such an elaborate--and quickly annoying--narrative device, it is evident from the start that there is no story here to be told, apart from the various hydraulics involved in human coupling. Although we are given some vague rhetoric about ``the Shadow of Myself'' and ``the Ghost of Lost Love,'' no person or event seems to bear the least relation to anyone or anything outside herself, himself, or itself, and what we ultimately seem to find are simply random (if vivid) depictions of people having sex, with nothing to unite them thematically. Erotic vignettes, some quite extraordinary, but not a book in any more rewardingly imaginable sense: raw material thrown haphazardly on the page. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.