From Kirkus Reviews
Fade in on Perry Patetick, the anti-hero of this so-called anti-love story, as he's about to lose his newspaper job and drift into the world of S&M, in particular D/S--D for Dominance, S for submission. Perry is a submissive, which means he gets chained up and beaten a lot. And you wouldn't believe how much he enjoys it. While making the scene, he also makes such new acquaintances as Auntie Maim, Lady Pain, and Deprav-o, whose voluminous contributions to his exotic education are lavishly detailed. But life takes a fateful turn when he meets Karen Pashlust, scene name Karenina. Off-scene, she's a respectable real-estate dealer, portly rather than svelte--from certain viewpoints she can look rather like Winston Churchill--but on-scene, she's somebody whose erotic soul vibrates to Perry's. They fall in love. They make plans to run off together. The fly in their ointment, however, is Karenina's husband. Bennie, clod though he is, adores Karenina almost as much as Perry does and won't let her go. Stalemate--until suddenly Karenina is found murdered, beaten to death, and guess who becomes the cops' number-one suspect. But Perry is one resourceful submissive, and nobody, but nobody, is going to set him up and get away with it. Kadet's debut has some of the mystery novel's trappings (steady there, Agatha Christie), but it's more identifiably a journey--toward pornography. Markers along the way are decadence, depravity, and sleaze. --
Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Back Cover
"In D/s, Gary Kadet takes the reader on a dazzling, dizzying ride into the phantasmagoric underworld of heavy-duty sexual fetishism, a spookily seductive realm that has rarely been treated with such boldness and bravura. In exploring that subterranean place where sex and violence, love and death, ritual and profanity are inextricably merged, Kadet has produced a brave and provocative book whose subject is nothing less than the mystery of the self."
-Harold Schecter, bestselling author of Deranged and Deviant
"Now here's a book that just oozes with non-stop, graphic, unnatural sex. Most writing about sex is awfully solemn and pretty awful, but this book is positively gleeful. It's called D/s-that's big D-slash-small s. Get it? Dominant/submissive, S&M. Gary S. Kadet's novel has an authoritarian air-thorough research-and his take throughout is that kinky, painful, often gender-bending sex is both ridiculous and fun....This sizable novel leisurely investigates the oddities of fetishism-there's an extremely funny group excursion to the big-time depravity of New York....
-Alice Turner, Fiction Editor, Playboy
"Gary S. Kadet is a magician. In just one chapter, he transforms an engagingly cynical reporter into a submissive apprentice to a nouveau-chic dominatrix. That the transformation strikes you as not merely credible but also inevitable speaks worlds about D/s as a novel, and the inclusion of a murder-mystery element catapults this 'walk on the wild side' into La Vida Loca. A truly different-and terrific-read."
-Jeremiah Healy, acclaimed author of Spiral
"This new literary voice takes us somewhere else. Kadet's novel of S&M, D/s for the adventurer who is willing to travel into a new erotic, suspenseful fictive dream: One that has not been dreamt before. Bravo to Kadet for keeping this reader marveling at his deft prose and turning the pages of this edgy story."
-MJ Rose, author of Lip Service
"Gary Kadet's first novel is brilliantly innovative and wildly original. D/s is Looking for Mr. Goodbar for the new millenium, taking us on a hellish ride along one man's descent into sexual and moral depravity that turns into a Kafka-esque nightmare. Reading it is like peeking into a world we're not supposed to see, a world hidden behind curtains Kadet parts with a bold vision and unique sensibility. His is a new and welcome voice that makes D/s stand for Damn sensational."
-Jon Land, author of A Walk in the Darkness
"Startlingly extortionate prose. As a crime story this book is truly the Curse of Cain. I loved it." -Robin Moore, author of The French Connection and The Accidental Pope
"This wicked, funny book spins the kind of tale I love to read: an everyman dragged down into a swirling underworld of sexual obsession while trying like hell to keep a toehold in normal life. It's like a trip to an adult amusement park where you know it's bad for you but you can't make yourself leave. Gary Kadet's writing is alternately hilarious and painfully insightful."
Philip Reed, author of Bird Dog
