Contours of Darkness

by Marco Vassi

Marco Vassi was possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compares his talent for prose to Henry Miller's writing. His sexual explorations and literary talent are the foundations of nine novels written between 1970 and 1976. Although his life was cut short, his memory lives on with the release of The Vassi Collection. The collection includes nine fiction titles and his autobiographical memoir, THE STONED APOCALYPSE, which follows his sexual liberation while on a trip he took in the sixties. Join Vassi in his exploration of the human sexual and spiritual experience. In Contours of Darkness a mix of strangers and lovers share love, sex, exploration and the new frontier of permissiveness, only to discover that their conventional upbringings carry more emotional weight than they are ready to deal with.

Genres: Erotica

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Marco Ferdinand William Vasquez-d'Acugno Vassi (New York City, November 6, 1937 – New York City, January 14, 1989) was an American experimental thinker and author, most noted for his erotica. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, publishing hundreds of short stories, articles, and more than a dozen novels. Many of his works appeared as "Anonymous" in their first printings. He is most often compared to Henry Miller, has been called the greatest erotic writer of his time and "foremost of his generation," and praised by the likes of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, and Kate Millett.

Reviews

[Smiley McGrouchpants Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild, crazy read. This book is a guide to the 60's: the real 60's, like that seen be (equally unafraid, equally having-served-in-the-Navy) Thomas Pynchon.

What the title refers to, of course, are those darkened folds of self that come out when we "play": sexual liberation sound great, of course, but every last vacillation of possession, resentment, lost fantasy, etc. ... will tremor through the human mind, in the process.

Not that Vassi's humorless and labored about: mirthful imp that he is, he's all too willing to quote a yogi (lop right down in the middle of the "free love" 60's) who drily observes "how is it, after all these, we just come back for the nipple?" (quoted in another work). That sort of perspective is in evidence, here: wide-eyed, but with an eye towards one's own foibles.

What is the 60's? Here, it's a sort of corner of a patch of California (no different, really, from that area which made Philip K. Dick's Radio Free Albemuth possible, in its specificity, when dream later turned to paranoid nightmare) that needs every last distinction to make these interactions, these debates, these experiences, and these givens possible: what's trite, what's radical, what's sexist, what's supportive. You'll be fascinated as much as you cringe (at times) at the guided tour Vassi takes you on of his characters' psyches. (Playing God, indeed!)

Pity he didn't get there before Erica Jong tried to provide a corollary to the incorrigible Henry Miller (past the first book — or so I'm told, by Pauline Kael, Orwell, etc.). Ditto crossing out your Philip Roth (or Woody Allen) with Nora Ephron — who cares? This is real Eros, 'cause there be story in it (that's when, uh, you learn other things via character detail, time and place, etc.).

Etc.

(And ... LSD!)

Hooray for Hootie and the Blowfish. So much for Country Joe and the Fish.

Or not ... ?