Introduction
"The greater the intellectual vacuum, the greater the need for distraction, a vacuum in people being presumably even more abhorrent than it is in nature."
This is a quotation from a wise and literate writer named John W. Aldridge, one of many modern thinkers who has devoted a great deal of time to a study of our modern young people. Aldrige has found that boredom-a malady that is not as plain and simple as it may seem at first-is one of our children's worst afflictions, a very real illness that drives teenagers in particular to all sorts of irrational and possibly harmful behavior. While everyone has experienced a form of boredom occasionally, it is only in the young that it seems to be chronic. In some cases, the condition seems to be almost an epidemic, coming to a head most dramatically in the case of college students who have no serious, deep-rooted interest in the problems they will face in later life.
As Aldridge says, "Equipped with this sort of lotusland metaphysics, the young arrive on the campuses with a very low boredom threshold and a very high expectation that their courses, functioning as mother-surrogates, will keep them safe from boredom by providing distractions that will seem compatible with their current interests."
Aldridge's book, from which these quotations are taken, is called In the Country of the Young and is well worth reading. But many other individuals and organizations have approached the same subject from various standpoints. For instance, a Public Affairs Pamphlet, How to Teach Your Child about Work, has this to say: "Usually, if one has the opportunity of working at the more creative and interesting jobs, he is less likely to find the humdrum ones disturbing."
Whether we are speaking of "providing distractions" or of teaching "creative and interesting jobs," however, we must consider exactly how the teachers are to reach the pupils in the first place. Here again we run smack up against that already overused phrase, "the generation gap." But while it may be overused, the phrase is meaningful and becoming more important all the time. These days, there is not just one generation gap but several. As one lecturer put it, "The generations these days are the four years you spend at college. Who can wait twenty years any more for a generation? Now it's a generation every election. Do you understand them?"
Finally, as Keith Botsford wrote (at the age of thirty-eight) in an essay called Youngers and Olders": "As I see it, each stage in life has its own learning. The Youngers can teach us what the world is, and the Olders what it was: we are in an undefined middle. The Youngers are the only ones absolutely at home in the present tense."
In My Sister, My Sex Slave, novelist Paul Roan considers all of these questions and supplies some intriguing answers of his own. Roan introduces us to two sisters, Norma and Lily, both of whom would be considered children by virtually every normally accepted definition. Lily is only thirteen and still in school; Norma is "going on sixteen" but pretends to be nineteen so that she can work and support the younger girl. Norma is willing and happy to accept this responsibility, but bored with her job. And Lily is bored, period.
Naturally, Norma is pleased when she is offered a more exciting and otherwise more rewarding position, even though some of the circumstances seem strange. She is to catalog a mansion filled with treasures, including rare books, masterpieces of art, silverware, and all sorts of other expensive things. While she has had no experience at this kind of work, she is intelligent enough to handle it and finds it fascinating. That is, until the strange circumstances become downright weird and very possibly evil....
Lily's boredom is not alleviated by any kind of constructive outlet at all. Lily, in fact, seems to become part of the evil web surrounding Norma, and to enjoy that evil to the hilt. It is an open question, however, which of the two is really more deserving of the title "sex pawn."
At first, Norma thinks the bizarre events taking place around her are dreams. But it soon becomes apparent that they are all too real. Norma is being used-used sexually to provide perverted pleasure to her ruthless captors, and used as a tool in an outrageous but carefully planned criminal plot. How she can escape, and rescue Lily from a situation which the younger girl has no desire to flee from, are dual problems that seem to have no solution.
My Sister, My Sex Slave is first and foremost, then, a novel of suspense, tension, and drama, well qualified to take its place on the shelf alongside the works of John D. MacDonald and other modern I masters of crime fiction. But it is also a milestone in psychological and sociological commentary, full of fresh insights and important perceptions. Read it for pleasure and thrills-you will find yourself thinking seriously about it afterward.
The Publishers