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Supervert Picks
Animal rights and pornography are two terms you don't often see yoked together, at least not in any explicit form. Which is not to say that the two realms never touch, because certainly they do. There is bestiality, where pornography triumphs over animal rights, and now there is also J. Eric Miller's volume of short stories, where pornography is — to form a bad pun — an animal rite. For in Miller's stories, bestiality is not a type of sexual intercourse but rather a kind of self-degradation, devolution, primitive impulse. His vision of sex is true to the spirit of the slang that reduces all sex objects to meat. The basic brutality of his approach calls to mind the old saying, "Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher." You get the sense that all the sex in his book involves bleeding, if not physically then psychically. The volume opens with a hard-hitting short called "Food Chain," a two-page tale that may well be the book's best story. In fact, it's an astonishing story, not just for its subject matter — a rural family that implodes through a series of competitively incestuous relationships — but for the brutal efficiency of its form. Told in simple, straightforward language, the story reads like a strange hybrid between a fable by Aesop and an obscene episode from Sade. It's so damn good that, since it is positioned as the first story in the volume, it makes you give the author credit the rest of the way through. As you read the stories that make up Animal Rights and Pornography, you'll grant Miller a flop or two because "Food Chain" has shown you what he's capable of. And just what is Miller capable of? The better stories include "Broken Harder," about a "straight" guy who ambivalently allows a Chinese stranger to rape him in a porno booth; "The Space Between Us," which presents cunnilingus in a manner that exemplifies Sartre's meditations on "the hole" in Being and Nothingness ("the hole is originally presented as a nothingness 'to be filled' with my own flesh..."); "Invisible Fish," a disturbing tale in which a pointlessly sadistic security guard tortures the animals in a pet shop at night; and "Hunger," which tells of a thin man who tries to force a diet upon his fattening wife, with the result that she is driven to an act of cannibalism. In all of his stories, Miller explores uncomfortable areas of sexuality: incest, male rape, bestiality, sadism, date rape. And though he writes about things pornographic, what makes his work itself un-pornographic is his technique. You get the sense that he learned a lot from the early work of Hemingway — simplicity of language and directness of approach. One story, "Exploiter," even seems to be a bastardized tribute to Hemingway's "My Old Man," though it's skewered by a kind of Weekly World News sensationalism (in Miller's story, my old man is looking for bigfoot). And indeed Miller does not confine himself to techniques drawn from the Hemingway school of concise literature, since he occasionally lapses into outright fantasy and absurdism, as in "Fish," which depicts the rape of a mermaid. The weaker stories in Animal Rights and Pornography are ones in which either the concept is unclear or in which a good concept just doesn't receive the execution it might have deserved. "The Motions" isn't about much. It seems to want to say something about how sex can be boring — "going through the motions" — but it says it in a boring, confused way. "Mercy Killer II" is a bad derivative of "The Raven," about a bird that won't go away. And "Every Mother's Son" has such a contrived concept — a son discovers porno pictures of his parents on the internet — that no amount of psychological sensitivity can rescue it from reading like an exercise in a composition class. In spite of such clunkers, Animal Rights and Pornography is a genuinely powerful volume of short stories. Its title calls to mind the placards you sometimes see liberal groups displaying on New York City streets — animal-rights groups who show shocking (and unreal) pictures of animals flayed alive in traps, and anti-porn feminists who always seem to show an old Hustler cover in which a naked woman is being put head-down into a meat grinder. When you see these on the streets, you tend to laugh them off as the propaganda they are — and yet when you read Animal Rights and Pornography, you get the sense that the two images might adequately symbolize Miller's vision of the libido. It's flayed and brutal, and by book's end you just might be convinced that we are all raw material in the meat grinder of sex. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Supervert Picks - Animal Rights and Pornography at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
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