The Great Urge Downward: A Novel

Gay fiction doesn't get any more tawdry or overheated than the novels of Gordon Merrick, touted as "the Harold Robbins of gay fiction." Golden-haired Lance Vanderholden, an actor struggling to escape his old-money family and his failed marriage, travels to the Central American town of Puerto Veragua. Renting a small house that comes with a curiously uninhibited and sexually precocious servant girl trained to please men, he finds himself drawn into a variety of sordid arrangements, including a depraved alliance with the mysterious Don Antonio, who loves Lance because he is "rotten with generations of money and power." This reprinting of the 1984 sequel to Perfect Freedom also brings the glamorous and commanding Robbie Cosling back to life. It's sexy, forgettable reading, with none of those pesky pretensions to literary merit. --Regina Marler