Velvet Cages

Heat Stroke, the first and shortest of three tales, crosses with tongue-in-cheek the sexual barriers of race, age, and culture in a brief and sensual encounter between a young black American and a white European woman. In A Green Beret, the spectacular often-inaccessible landscape of Ethiopia is the unalloyed backdrop for an erotic story filled with fear and tenderness, ending in death for male lover. Two young and beautiful sisters compete for a war hero whose model could have been Agamemnon or Achilles - not in their evanescent shapes as they lived and fought, but as they were caught in white marble by Praxiteles. The magnificent mountain world at the Horn of Africa is the sole empyrean in The Sadist ironically framing an abusive marriage among the upper European classes exiled in Ethiopia. A mansion in Addis Ababa becomes the velvet cage for a young German wife. Surrounded by watchful servants, the attractive, long-limbed woman is kept a prisoner in her luxurious home. There she is ritually caned, raped and psychologically abused by her Armenian husband who was raised to believe that women exist only for the pleasure of men.