Child of the Sun [Mass Market Paperback]

Kyle Onstott (Author), Lance Horner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1972

This brilliant and brutally intimate novel captures accurately the depravity and intrigue of Ancient Rome. CHILD OF THE SUN tells the story of the youth Varius Avitus Hassianus, destined to become Emperor of the Roman empire. Varius spurned women. His erotic longings searched out a very different kind of love. Whatever or whomever he fancied was quickly offered to him. And no man, be he soldier or citizen, dared refuse him. As his perverted passions grew more and more bizarre, even the voluptuaries of Rome recoiled In horror.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Fawcett Gold Medal Books; First Thus edition (October 1972)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0007DQEF0
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,178,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's So Bad, It's Good!!, October 31, 2009

By 

J. Lewis - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

I first read this novel when I was in junior high and just beginning my own sexual awakening. I won't recommend it for anyone that age today (it's probably a bit over-the-top for most very young readers in my opinion), but had a blast re-reading it recently and reconnecting with my adolescent fantasies and longings of a couple decades ago. Back then, though, I keep this novel, and those fantasies, well hidden from my parents. The plot is very loosely based on what is known of the short life and reign of Elagabalus, High Priest of the Syrian sun-god of that name and Emperor of Rome 218-222 A.D. The main source for the historical background here is the 4th century A.D. "Augustan History", aka "Lives of the Later Caesars," itself considered more gossip than reliable historical documentation (this novel led me to "The Lives" and other historical investigations of this emperor in college). Still, this is a novel, and literary license among other kinds is fully evident here. Elagabalus was an effeminate homosexual youth of perhaps fourteen when his family engineered his proclamation as emperor by the Roman armies of the East. Some historians speculate that he may have been transsexual. In either case, the custom, culture and sun-cult of second century Syria in which he was raised made him precociously sexual and highly promiscuous at the time he was proclaimed emperor. While considered normal in his native Emesa, his sexual antics, to say nothing of his flamboyant transvestism even before the Senate, did not go over well in Rome. Nor did his penchant for gladiators and other types of rough trade. Needless to say, this young emperor came to a bad end.

"Child of the Sun" reads like a gay Harelquin romance, appropriately modified: lots of non-explicit but salacious depictions of sex, plenty of rough trade, and an exaggerated fashion sense (the Emperor is a stickler for the right gowns and shoes). Of course, true love eventually leads Elagabalus to abandon his endless supply of virile, hard-bodied young paramours from every corner of the Empire -- and its cosmopolitan army -- for his one true love; a sun-bronzed golden-haired perfectly formed Adonis just coming into full-blooded manhood. And who, of course, is entirely devoted to his "beloved", as he call Elagabalus. It takes some time for this tramp of an Emperor to put aside his old ways and make a monogamous commitment -- he had, after all, gone to the trouble of building his own bathhouse in his own palace to better acquire well-equipped men for his amusement -- but he eventually does so. He also grows as a person in the process, leaving behind his petty preoccupations with fine clothes, rare perfumes, over-refined luxuries, exaggerated female affects, i.e. the hallmarks of stereotypical effeminacy, as he comes to understand true love; and that his days as Emperor will soon be cut short by some assassin. Elagabalus evolves from a silly, shallow, grossly overindulged tiresome sissy to a young man able to give and accept the love of another young man while being his authentic self and meeting his end with dignity.

The literary style of this novel is likewise Harlequinesque in its purple prose, dramatic love-scenes and ability to construct sexual tension without falling into pornographic excesses. This is not high-brow literature. But I remember it as one of my biggest literary thrills as a teenager and enjoyed reading it again after all these years. Like the old Brian Ferry song says, "Trash is Neat!"

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to spoil a child and alienate people, September 29, 2009

By 

Ventura Angelo (Brescia, Lombardia Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

The future Emperor Varius Avitus Bassianus is firstly presented to us as an utterly amoral,sex-obsessed sadistically perverted youth, enjoying the suffering of poor slaves for his own pleasure. Then we get to know his less than moral family, and we learn that Varius has been deliberatedly brought up thusly by his mother, who plans to make him her own pleasure-sodden puppet emperor. We follow the golden brat as he's elevated to Elah-ga-Baal priesthood, his relationship with Zoticus, his arrival in Rome.Here all hell breaks loose, with the Emperor Elah-ga-Baal determined to impose his quaintly exotic religion and his utterly un-Roman mores on a stunned and outraged populace. The misguided Emperor will find, in a poignant scene, the meaning of true love and the beginning of a moral resipiscence, but alas! too late.
A magnificently, luxuriously narrated tragedy of Roman Decadence.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written unusual story, April 14, 2009

By 

Kobita "Kevin" (PA USA) - See all my reviews

For me, this is the most Roman feeling novel, just as Satyricon is the most Roman feeling film.