reviewed by Todd Belton

I've always been a fan of those "choose your own path" stories. You know the kind I mean:

I've been reading them for many years -- of late I've been following the excellent Give Yourself Goosebumps series from R.L. Stine. Don't snicker. Choose-your-own stories are a lot of fun; the thing is, they are hardly ever written for adults, with adult humor and adult situations.

Some months ago this situation began to bother me. Why shouldn't grownups have fun too? Wouldn't a kinky choose-your-own story be a real hoot? When I found out that Behind Closed Doors was such a book, I knew I'd have to buy it.

The book is reversible -- it has two front covers. You start reading from one end to play a female protagonist; the other end for a male. Each side of the book consists of forty short chapters or episodes. Most of the episodes involve some sort of sexual act, although not necessarily one where you are an active participant.

Originally I was going to complain that the book wasn't kinky enough. Then I read the whole book from beginning to end, without bothering to play in sequence, and realized that the book actually spans an impressive array of vices. Just about every kink short of infantilism is covered here. There is oral sex, aural sex, anal sex, voyeurism, dominance, bondage, group sex, rape fantasies, cross-dressing, piss games, a scene involving a dog, and various unclassifyables.

Yet if you are expecting something viciously sexy, you are likely to be disappointed. In fact, I consider the book a failure on the raw level. As fiction it works; as arousal material, probably not. The problem is mostly the language. Reyes loves sensory prose, and seems at her best when describing clothing or the curves of someone's rear or the feeling of being crotch-deep in warm mud. The sex acts themselves, though, are reported dispassionately. Here is what could have been one of the more shocking scenes in the book, when the male protagonist gets raped by a crowd of sex-deprived women:

Yup, that's it. The sequence goes on to describe the catfighting as the women jockey for position, but offers no further word about the sex itself, nor what the hero is feeling. No panic, no lust. In fact, the protagonists don't show much emotion at all throughout. They react, but they do not feel, develop or learn. They can't. In order to do so, the writer would have to ascribe feelings to the reader's surrogate that the reader might not actually be experiencing. This is the peril of choose-your-path stories, and may be why they've never worked as a true literary medium.

Nonetheless, some of the blame has to be laid at Reyes' feet as well. Contrast the language she uses later when the hero sees a lovely young widow:

It's a pity Reyes doesn't seem this passionate about sexual description, although to be fair, it's unclear how much of the problem lies with the translator. The original is in French, and given that the translation has visible problems already (many misspellings and grammatical oddities), I can't be sure how much of the word choice was affected. For example, it strikes me as odd that the hero would refer to the same widow described above, whose every inch he has praised for two solid pages, as "the most gorgeous slut I ever met." Are these Reyes' words or the translator's? I don't know, but in many cases the phrasing is jarring. One beautiful scene was abruptly wrecked for me by the words "pine cone of love." Only Anka Radakovich gets to use phrases like that with a straight face.

I also have some problems with the portrayals of the protagonists. They're not allowed to have much of a personality, but even so, the hero comes across as homophobic, and also tends to think that any women who like sex are sluts. He's aware of both faults, but doesn't do anything about them. The heroine shows no reluctance to engage in any acts, little conscience at all, in fact. Does Reyes really believe that this is how men and women generally behave?

It's worth noting that Reyes does subject her hero to most of the kinkier sex acts, so perhaps his greater reluctance is justified. (The two sides of the book do not parallel each other until the end. You're supposed to try both.)

My final big complaint is that as a choose-your-path book, Behind Closed Doors is a failure. You might as well read it start-to-finish and ignore the sequence. Until the last four chapters, where you have to pick an outcome, each chapter is fairly self-contained; you could treat the book as a collection of short-shorts and it would work just as well. At no time do you feel like the decisions you are making actually affect the outcome until the ending, which feels tacked on.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that it isn't very arousing or interactive, I think the book is worth recommending. The stories themselves are weird and dreamlike enough to be fun even when they're not erotic. (The sleepwalking demeanor of the protagonists reinforces this.) Several old folk tales get retold, generally with an unusual twist, indicating that Reyes knows how to have fun. (My favorite is a Sleeping Beauty that the hero never does succeed in waking up.) And a few stories are genuinely hot, like an episode where the hero has to hide from a bride's betrothed under the wedding gown's petticoats, between her legs. If that doesn't sound arousing, it's because I don't want to give away the fun part.

In short, if you read this, read it as a series of odd vignettes, nothing more, and you will get the most mileage from it. And if you happen to see a copy in French (where it's called Derrière la porte), let me know; I'm in the market.