Issue #0

Plot

"High summer in a sweltering London club, and I'm getting into my drunken stride after midnight, rubbing sweat with the shoulders that pass by, and thinking vaguely about another drink, or about cruising the pissoirs"

The opening lines of Paul Golding's first novel, The Abomination, set the scene and tone of this provocative, and intimate, story. Dedicated to a "haunting, unspeakable variant of love", Santiago Moore Zamora begins, and ends, his sexual chronicle in the clubs and dungeons of the "outcast children of Sodom and Gormorrah": the boys and men, lovers and prostitutes, who, in this version of the contemporary sexual metropolis, work "like buggery for their treacherous futures" and live on the edge of "the troubles" that haunt Zamora's narrative. The Abomination revels in sex and language, the texture and depth of bodies and words. Two relatively brief sections on the contemporary London scene frame the bulk of a narrative that takes its readers back into Zamora's childhood and youth: his privileged early years in Spain; the loneliness, and lusts, of life at an English boarding school (the analogy with the pleasures of the sexual dungeon is an overt theme of the book). Isolated, Zamora seeks redemption in the figure of Mr Wolfe: "I choose to lose my way back to the dormitory and find myself, instead, at his door. I'm nine years old. Don't look so shocked." In this way, Golding lets his readers know that he knows that his subject is controversial: childhood sexuality, love and sex between adult and child, its impact on sexual life in adulthood. Controversy may not be enough to sustain The Abomination throughout its 500-odd pages, but Golding offers a tour de force for those with the stamina to make it through to the end. --Vicky Lebeau