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Short Stories

The Stranger Inside: An erotic adventure edited by Red Symons

by Kerryn Goldsworthy
December 1994, no. 167

The Stranger Inside: An erotic adventure by Red Symons

Text Publishing, $16.95 pb

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

The Stranger Inside is billed on its own front cover as ‘an erotic adventure’. The title would be considerably more innocuous if the book didn’t announce itself as erotica, but once it does, the phrase ‘the stranger inside’ suddenly becomes suggestive in the extreme. It’s a good title, partly because grammar renders it fruitfully ambiguous: apart from the obvious implication, it could also mean ‘the inner alien’ (a fragment of psychobabble, as in ‘the inner child’), or perhaps ‘the more peculiar interior’ (as in ‘my inside is stranger than yours’). Whichever way you read it inside the body, inside the book, inside the soul the phrase suggests that eroticism depends on a combination of interiority and mystery.

 


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The Stranger Inside: An erotic adventure by Red Symons

Text Publishing, $16.95 pb

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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