In Freak Parade Marilyn Jaye Lewis takes the reader on an exciting romp through a Manhattan of the very recent past that is surely as extinct as the days of trolley cars and vaudeville. The action starts in a posh Central Park West penthouse where retired rock star Eugenia (Genie) Sharpe has just discovered that her partner, music-industry mogul Daryl, for whom she has given up her career, has been two-timing her with a wide assortment of freaky wannabe starlets. This discovery propels Genie back into the downtown world from which she emerged – a world that is on the cusp of changing from the dangerous, gritty place she remembered into the fashionable, gentrified, and less-edgy destination of young, middle-class fun-seekers it has since become.
Genie is a character in search of both emotional intimacy and sexual fulfillment. Her old downtown life, which she slips back into after leaving Daryl’s apartment, provides the latter in spades, in encounters with male and female lovers, both old and new. As in her other books, Lewis is a master at creating achingly intense scenes of erotic abandon in which pain and pleasure collide in an alchemical quest for the philosopher’s stone of unbounded ecstasy. Readers who are looking to further their own explorations into this realm will be happily surprised by the places Freak Parade takes them to. Genie particularly revels in the transformations she experiences while enduring the pain and pleasure of exquisitely described interludes of anal sex, first with an out-of-control dildo-wielding lesbian top, and later with a generously-endowed and insatiable Latino man.
But emotional intimacy is a lot harder to find. Genie thought she had found it with Daryl, and she accepted a reduced sexual-bliss quotient as an acceptable trade-off. The dive bars of downtown Manhattan might seem to be an unlikely place to find a relationship in which emotional intimacy combines with mind-blowing sexual pyrotechnics. Much of the tension in Freak Parade revolves around whether this quest will prove to be successful.
But there are many other reasons to read and enjoy this novel. It is a complex, literary novel, and yet one that is a real page-turner in the best sense. Lewis knows how to create compelling minor characters without wasting the reader’s time with descriptive prose that is too elaborate. Her dialogue is focused and believable, and it fairly sparkles off the page as one reads it. Perhaps best of all, her portrayal of the downtown Manhattan demimonde reveals her knowledge of and love for one of the most exciting periods in the history of the city, and it will appeal to everyone who was there or who wishes they had been there.
