Kit Marlowe

I write consensual erotic stories featuring various combinations of men, women, and everyone in between. I believe that smut is even more fun when it's literary and well written, and I hope that you agree.

27 Jul, 2025 The Anatomy of Desire - "A"
This is the first in my series of close readings of erotic fiction. For the context around these short essays, see this post. As the series grows you'll be able to find all of the posts using the tags. Today I'm looking at Alice Joanou's "A" from The Mammoth Book of Erotica.

I've been hunting for a copy of this story that's available online, since a close reading of a work is only really useful when it's paired with the original text. Unfortunately "A" doesn't appear to be available anywhere, aside from in a digital copy of The Mammoth Book of Erotica on the Internet Archive. The story originally appeared in Joanou's collection Tourniquet, which is out of print, and doesn't appear to have been reprinted elsewhere. I suspect this may turn out to be the case for many of the stories in this anthology, so if you're planning to follow along with this series I'd recommend picking up a used copy (I got mine for £3 from ebay).

Since the story isn't freely available anywhere, here's a quick synopsis. "A" follows an unnamed female narrator recounting her affair with a married man. The story moves non-linearly between memory, dream, and present action, beginning with the narrator's declaration that their sexual encounters had "the precision and focus of cruelty."

Through a mixture of flashback and fantasy, we learn how the affair developed from initial attraction to obsessive transgression. The narrator presents herself as the dominant partner, both sexually and psychologically, while describing the man's growing guilt and his wife's attempts to save their marriage.

The story culminates when the narrator and her lover visit his home to confront his wife. They find her passed out drunk on the kitchen floor, wearing what appears to be a wedding dress. Rather than leave, the narrator insists they have sex next to the unconscious woman, ultimately involving the wife's body in their encounter while she remains unaware.

The narrative is structured as the narrator's reflection on these events, presented as both confession and boast. Throughout, she maintains that she felt no guilt about the affair, viewing it instead as a form of superior honesty about desire and power.

I need to be honest: I don't find this story arousing. Despite its graphic sexual content and technical sophistication (which we'll get to), "A" left me intellectually engaged but physically unmoved. This raises an interesting question that I think will be worth carrying through this entire series: does erotica need to be arousing to succeed?

There's a comparison to be made with horror, here. Not every horror story scares every reader. What terrifies one person might leave another completely unmoved, and we don't consider those stories failures because of it. We understand that fear is intensely personal, and that it depends on our individual psychology, our personal traumas, our cultural context, our mood when reading.

The same principle applies to erotic response. What arouses us is deeply individual, shaped by our desires, experiences, and psychological makeup. A story that leaves one reader cold might be intensely erotic for another. But more importantly, arousal might not be the only metric by which we should judge erotic fiction.

"A" succeeds at examining the psychology of sexual predation, the mythology we create around transgression, and the complex power dynamics of desire. It uses explicit sexual content not as an end in itself, but as a tool for character development and thematic exploration. It may well be that the story also intends to turn us on, and for some readers it may well succeed. The fact that it doesn't succeed for me doesn't diminish the story's value as erotica. Rather, it expands our understanding of what erotica can do. Erotic fiction can use sexuality to examine questions far beyond arousal: power, identity, morality, psychology, human connection, etc.

As I continue through this series, I'll be paying attention to this question. Some stories will likely succeed at both arousal and literary sophistication. Others might excel at one but not the other. And some might challenge our assumptions about what erotic fiction should even be trying to accomplish. But for now, let's return to "A".

This is a complex story, both in its themes and on the technical level of craft, particularly in its structure and the way it handles its sexuality.

Let's start with the opening sentence: "The way we fucked each other had the precision and focus of cruelty." This line immediately subverts our expectations of what erotica should be. it's jarring, violent, and sets the tone for everything that follows. What, exactly, is "the precision and focus of cruelty"? These aren't generally words we associate with sex, or with loving relationships (not that erotica has a duty to be about love in any sense). "Precision" suggests clinical detachment, an emotional distance between the two lovers despite their physical proximity. "Focus" implies a deliberate targeting. We're examining sex as a form of physical and psychological violence, and we establish that immediately.

That violence continues in the opening paragraphs. Their bodies "grate together" - not caress, or embrace, but literally abrade each other. We're treated to images of "all the bleeding, all the noise," which is juxtaposed against the claim that they're "making love". If this is love, it's painful. Before we know anything else about this couple or their relationship, we're made to feel uncomfortable about it.

Joanou structures the narrative like a spiral rather than a straight line, moving between memory, dream, and present action. There's also a circularity to it - we begin with violent imagery ("The way we fucked each other had the precision and focus of cruelty") and return to it at the end ("[our] delicate skin like two razors coming together. Our bodies were slicing.") This circular structure suggests that the narrator is trapped in a cycle of transgression, unable to move beyond it.

The narrative builds in roughly five movements:
1. The thesis statement, the opening declaration of cruel precision
2. The dream sequence, showing the narrator's mythologised version of events
3. The historical development, detailing how the affair escalated
4. The confrontation in the marital home
5. The final violation, as the couple fuck beside and on top of the unconscious wife
What I really love about Joanou's structure here is how she creates uncertainty about what's real. In the dream sequence we initially don't know exactly what's happening, and we're led to believe that the nameless wife might be dead. It's only later that we dicover that she's passed out drunk. There's an ambiguity and fluidness to the details and the way that things are revealed to us, and we're not entirely sure if what we're reading is a dream, a memory, or an invention of the narrator's. There's a chance this whole thing is entirely fantasy, but we have no way to know that for sure.

During the story the narrator presents herself as all-powerful, but Joanou reveals this almost entirely through contrast with the drunk, unconscious, powerful wife. Her "drunken, slack face" is contrasted with the narrator's "taut" body. The wife is vulnerable and defenceless, while the narrator is in complete control of herself and the husband. "I turned my attention to my own body," she says, "and remember feeling pleased at how powerful it looked at that moment, how strong and able." The narrator is performing power as much as feeling it. She's literally posing for us, creating a tableau of dominance.

But this power is built entirely on a foundation of the wife, and the narrator knows it. She admits as much to us - "But I knew that the orgasms, the wild flowering orgasms that shattered windows and tore holes in the walls, in my lungs, in my heart, were hinged on his wife's existence." Her power is entirely contingent. Without the wife' vulnerability, there's no transgression, and without transgression, there's no power.

These shifting, complex power dynamics are the bedrock on which "A" is built, and once you start to look at them closely they become quite unsettling, particularly as we examine the way the narrator talks about consent and consciousness. The narrator repeatedly returns to images of people being drunk, or insane, or somehow not entirely in control of themselves. The wife is literally unconscious, passed out from drinking; the husband is "drunk with criminal passions, [...] absolutely smashed with the idea of leaving a life he hated"; even the narrator seems intoxicated by her own power, fascinated by her body and the grip she has over the lives of this couple.

This obsession with power and intoxication culminates in a final scene that walks the line of sexual assault and, arguably, crosses it. While being fucked atop the passed-out wife, the narrator helps herself to the woman's prone body, eventually kissing her unresponsive lips. "I fell forward," she tells us, "and put my lips over her mouth. I kissed her slowly, letting my tongue slip her lips, feeling the creases of her soft, dead mouth."

The word "dead" here is particularly chilling - the wife isn't just unconscious, she's described as corpse-like, and the narrator seems to find this exciting rather than disturbing. This raises some uncomfortable questions about power fantasies in erotic fiction. The narrator isn't just having an affair; she's orchestrating a deliberate violation of boundaries that goes far beyond adultery. She wanted the wife to witness their transgression ("I was hoping that she would wake up, thinking our crime really wouldn't be complete unless she knew about it"), but when that's not possible, she'll settle for using the woman's unconscious body as a prop in their final performance.

The wife exists purely as object throughout this story, and this feels very deliberate. She's described as "inert," "prone and vulnerable," "victimized, dead to passion, dead to our world." She has no agency, no voice, no interiority. She's furniture in her own violation. But there's something more sophisticated happening here than simple objectification. The narrator, despite being a woman herself, treats the wife exactly as male-dominated pornography typically treats women - as a prop whose purpose is to enhance someone else's pleasure. The wife is unconscious and unable to participate, which actually heightens the narrator's excitement rather than diminishing it. She becomes a toy to be manipulated for the narrator's gratification.

This dynamic reaches its climax in the final sexual encounter, where the narrator literally uses the wife's body to intensify her own orgasm, but then deliberately denies her any participation in that pleasure: "I tore my mouth from hers before I was going to come, not wanting to give her that." Even unconscious, the wife is positioned as a rival who might steal some fragment of the narrator's satisfaction.

This could be read as sharp commentary on pornographic tropes that center one person's pleasure (traditionally male) while reducing others to vehicles for that pleasure. By having a female narrator replicate these exact patterns with another woman, Joanou makes the critique more stark. The narrator has internalized the very objectification that women typically suffer under male gaze, and she wields it as a weapon against another woman.

The story ends with what seems like a throwaway detail: "I remember that her dress smelled like mothballs." On my first reading I wasn't really sure what this line was achieving, especially as the opening line is so deliberate and so clear about its intentions. But as I've spent time with the story I've come to think that this final image is perfect. Mothballs preserve things that are already dead - they keep wedding dresses in storage, maintaining the form while the substance has long since lost meaning, preventing moths from picking away at them and destroying them. The wife's marriage, like her dress, is being artificially preserved despite being essentially lifeless, while a pest slowly pokes holes in it. The mothball smell is the scent of something kept beyond its natural lifespan, a relationship maintained through habit rather than love.

But the narrator is the moth in this metaphor - she's been feeding on this marriage, poking holes in it, slowly destroying it from within. The mothballs don't just preserve the dress; they repel the very creature that would consume it. In that final moment, surrounded by the oppressive weight of domestic objects and the husband's retreat into conventional cowardice, the narrator realises she can no longer feed on this relationship. The forces that preserve the marriage - social expectation, material comfort, the wife's passive endurance - are the same forces that will ultimately expel her. She needs the marriage to exist in order to transgress against it, but she can never fully destroy it without destroying the very foundation of her own power. The mothball smell is her recognition that she's been repelled, that her particular form of consumption has reached its limit. It's the perfect final note for a story about the death of intimacy, and about a predator who discovers the constraints of her own parasitism.

Lessons From "A"
Joanou demonstrates several craft techniques that we can bear in mind while writing our own erotica:
- Opening lines as genre signals: Your first sentence can immediately establish whether you're working within genre conventions or subverting them. Use unexpected word combinations to signal your intentions early.
- Repetitive imagery for character psychology: Returning to similar images (violence, intoxication, bodies as weapons) throughout a story can show that a character is psychologically stuck rather than evolving.
- Physical descriptions as power maps: How you describe bodies in relation to each other (taut vs slack, active vs passive) can reveal power dynamics without exposition.
- Character dependency as flaw: Having characters admit what their power depends on can reveal fundamental weaknesses, which in turn make the characters feel more alive on the page. The most dangerous characters are often the most dependent ones.
- Consistent motifs for thematic unity: Pick a concept (intoxication, clinical language, etc.) and thread it throughout your story to create coherence while building meaning. Hit those themes hard and often so that readers can't miss them.
- Commentary through character action: You can critique cultural patterns by having characters embody and enact them, rather than talking about them directly.
These techniques work across genres because they're about using craft elements to reveal character psychology and advance themes simultaneously.

Next time I'll be looking at 'Fade To Black' by Ian Breakwell. If you've read "A" and have any thoughts about it, or if you have any suggestions for more contemporary stories I could look at, please sound off in the comments!

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Lessons From "A"

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