Foreword
Revenge is one of the most powerful themes in literature. Equally powerful is the theme of sexual attraction between two people. Author Mickey France has taken these two biblically-inherent threads and woven a tale, almost moralistic in tone, in which the desire for revenge and the desire for love clash head-on in a battle that leaves every participant scarred.
We see in Sylvia Akron a personification of many of our society matrons today. She is bitter, unhappy, and disappointed that the magic, the wonderful promises of life have like the morning mists burned away under the hot glare from the sun of reality. At thirty-one she is childless and ready for divorce after ten years of marriage. When she realized that her husband has used her and betrayed her and is now preparing to discard her, Sylvia Akron becomes an avenging angel of doom.
Under her neurotic plan for revenge, she uses everyone -including her own body -- as expendable pawns in some grotesque chess game of revenge. Tod Shelton, the private detective who had taken the revealing photographs of Sylvia's husband and his secretary, finds himself serving first as a hired stud, then as a scout for wife-swapping clubs that might be used in her plan.
During a wife-swap party aboard a yacht off the Southern California coast, both Tod and Sylvia encounter their moments of truth. For Sylvia, she is offered a second chance to experience everything she has missed in her marriage, sexual contentment, happiness, companionship. So blinded is she however, in her desire to humiliate her husband, that the opportunity for happiness appears and disappears before she realizes it. Later, as she lay beneath the weight of four strangers, each using her body for his own delight, she begins to understand that the quest of revenge has led into the deepest depths of total depravity.
Tod's revelation comes when he realizes that the golden apple being offered to him by Sylvia is poisoned forbidden fruit, and that the things that will wither and die if he remains around her destructive presence.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Fuller wrote in Gnomologia, "In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; in passing it over, he is superior."
In this graphic, extremely candid novel by Mr. France, the question of superiority and the question of the strength of love over revenge are not answered until the final page.
The Publishers
Sausalito, California
December, 1973