The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game

All about The Devil's Breath, Players and The Honeytrap

So, I'm delighted to announce my first title with Uruk Press' Biggest Blade imprint. It's called The Honeytrap, and it's live on Amazon right now. Huzzah!

What can you expect? Well, this is contemporary erotic fiction, something different from the fantasy and SF fare I've published with the good people of Uruk Press thus far. Biggest Blade, for those who don't know, largely deals in hot wives, well-endowed alpha males and tales of delicious infidelity. The Honeytrap is an "interracial" take on this, ladling a big helping of graphic, steamy, and quite frankly outright filthy hardcore sex over the basic concept. After the jump, I'll talk a little bit more about what this means, and about the background to the book and the particular naughty wellsprings of inspiration from which it flows.

Our "heroine," Gemma, is an affluent but restless young woman who seeks extra thrills in the wrong places, leading a perilous second life outside her respectable vocation as a nurse. Her alternate persona, "Gemma of the Night," masquerades as a hooker and uses drugs stolen from the hospital pharmacy to target, dose and rob unsuspecting Johns. At one point she gets sloppy and her antagonists turn this game around on her, leaving her drugged insensate and exploited in her turn -- and yes, that does mean sexually exploited while under the influence, so be warned if that's not your thing -- and in the course of these events and what follows she winds up engaged in everything from torrid cheating romps to public bondage and humiliation, double penetrations and even gang-bangs. 

The Honeytrap deals, of course, in a fantasy-friendly version of all these shenanigans in which the heroine ultimately derives profound pleasure from and fulfils her deepest, darkest desires through her raunchy misadventures. By the end she has either transcended "Gemma of the Night" or effectively been transformed into her, you could see it either way. Basically of course the point is for it to be hot, and everything about her tale is exaggerated and heightened toward that purpose. 

That said, the story does have some real-world anchors and inspirations. 

The Devil's Breath.

Hyoscine, around which the major plot points of Gemma's second life revolve, is a real drug and an element in various drug cocktails used to treat motion sickness or inflammation. It's synonymous with scopolamine, a drug that has recently become infamous for its use in criminal activities as The Devil's Breath. (This was in fact an alternate title for the novella.) 

The drug can in fact have effects on suggestibility and memory plausibly similar to what we see in the story; so, for instance, it really can be used to dose people and get them to empty their banks accounts or do other things they wouldn't normally do. Of course in the real world this has considerably less sexy results than I allow for in the fantasy. For the sake of space and dramatic convenience I don't try to portray its full range of effects, which can also include vivid hallucinations, impaired motor function and long, dangerous periods of unconsciousness. 

VICE treats the subject of burundanga, the source of hyoscine/scopolamine, in characteristically lurid fashion below. Take them with a grain of salt, as they're prone to sensationalism, but they do manage to make a fun watch out of what really isn't a fun subject for those who wind up on the wrong end of the stick.

The Player.

When writing "interracial" erotica, I don't typically like to fall back on straight-forward "thug" and "bimbo / slut" stereotypes, and I don't think a tale is "interracial" if it simply involves two people with different skin colours getting it on. The interesting thing about "interracial" erotica for me is that it actively plays with and derives from the hang-ups, buried sexual fascinations and attempts to "play" or live up to stereotypical roles among the various characters. So, our heroine is tempted into the jaws of the trap by buried, half-acknowledged interracial fantasies (which become un-buried PDQ); and the rapper she initially targets, who is most directly inspired by figures like The Weeknd or Drake, recommends himself as a target because he plays like a spoiled suburban kid imitating a received idea of what a rock or hip-hop superstar should be. 

Our main alpha male pseudo-antagonist, "King" James Worthington, is inspired in equal parts by the infamous Deathrow Records CEO and all-around gangbanger Suge Knight, porn superstar Lexington Steele, and dignified actor Lance Reddick on account of he has self-consciously worked to acquire some poise and polish and shed the aura of being "street." (Physique-wise he probably also owes a little to Terry Crews. Or maybe I just like having an excuse to link to a video of Terry Crews. You be the judge.) Above all else, though, he's a player.

The most extreme form of the player, assuming we don't just use the terms interchangeably, is the pimp: a predatory figure with sufficiently flexible morals to spot vulnerabilities in women and exploit them to make himself a surrogate "daddy" figure who runs their lives and their finances. Gunplay, Florida rap superstar and apparent actual pimp, breaks it down here:

If you've been around any kind of reasonably heavy music or subcultural scene for any length of time, you've seen at some point the kinds of dynamics Gunplay talks about exploiting. Listening to people like Gunplay casually chat about this stuff sometimes chills my blood with a sense of proximity when I remember conversations with women who, having undergone some personal or financial trauma, literally looked me in the eye and said they needed someone to "tell [them] what to do." Faced with someone who lacked certain boundaries, it's not hard to imagine what such people could have been lured into; fortunately in fiction we can imagine it without actually harming anyone.

But as Gunplay says, pimping is a twenty-four hour job and is likely not as glamorous as people like the guys interviewing him seem to think it is. So, what if you're morally flexible enough to enjoy exploiting that power over someone but don't want or need the money, nor the headache of becoming a pimp? Well, then, you become a player like "King" James; ultimately the kind of twisted "dominant" about whom dark stories might circulate in, say, your local BDSM or club scene. And our story is, perhaps, almost as much about his journey toward at least a flickering of long-lost conscience as it is about Gemma's journey into his grasp. Maybe.

Deep, right? 

Why, thank you, Close Personal Friend Will Smith.

Allow Me to Play You Out.

The source text for The Honeytap is above all the Smokey Robinson song "The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game." There are so many great versions of this song, a few perennial favourites being:

Things just ain't the same in this old world, dear readers. Be careful out there, until we meet again. And remember to pick up your copy of The Honeytrap today!