Tara of the Twilight

 

As I have said before, Lin Carter was a diligent editor and literary historian, but at best a mediocre novelist. He had enthusiasm and imagination, but his characterization was bland and his sense of action and timing were execrable, which are signal failings when one is trying to write Sword & Sorcery. Today I will eviscerate what is probably the worst book he ever wrote: the semi-infamous Tara of the Twilight.

It’s not clear, really, whose idea this was. In his forward (!) Carter waxes rather scholarly about “the erotic impulse” and so forth, while mentioning that he had never written anything that was A: from the point of view of a female, and B: meant to be porn in any way. Both of these are big warning signs of the awfulness to follow. But he also mentions Zebra editor Roy Torgeson, who can bear some of the blame for his travesty. Torgeson – an editor of some note in the 70s and 80s – worked mostly in hard SF, and it’s not clear what he was doing at Zebra in 1979.

Zebra books is an imprint of Kensington Publishing, and is very much still around. Their main focus has always been Regency Romance titles, which they still put out to this day. But there was a period from 1975-1985 when they were trying to expand their slate a bit, publishing some westerns, and even some horror novels. They don’t seem to really be proud of Tara, and it’s not hard to see why.

I stumbled on the book when I was seventeen – pretty much the ideal audience for bad porn – and I still found it all but unreadable. I did read it, mostly to see just how terrible it was, the same instinct that causes us to lance boils and look at car accidents. As porn, it was a complete failure, because it was impossible to jerk off to, even when I was seventeen.

Tara follows the tale of the titular heroine, who is a red-haired sixteen-year-old girl who has been raised by a wizard and is a sworn worshiper of a rather nebulous pantheon of gods who demand her virginity; also to be a war-maiden she has to wear no armor, and go about conveniently almost naked. Thus, Carter has an in-universe rationale for the “chainmail bikini” trope. He does, however, fall hard into the “omniscient boobs” style of writing, where all of Tara’s attributes are discussed in lavish detail and with a great deal of leering that makes no sense in a first-person narrative. Also, let us just deal with the fact that we are being invited to lust after a sixteen-year-old girl, something that simply would not fly today. Unfortunately, this is not the only highly unpleasant turn this story will take.

Far from any kind of action-adventure, the novel is simply our heroine going from one kind of captivity to another, and the vaunted warrior skills she is said to possess seem to do her no good whatsoever. She is enslaved by a succession of vile and lecherous captors, and is thus subjected to all manner of depravity without any kind of consent. Now, there is certainly a market for this kind of porn, where consent is dubious or nonexistent, but it is really rather gross to discover that Tara is essentially rape porn from one end to the other.

Tara spends the bulk of her time a captive of the barbarian warlord Hunza – a typically musclebound, illiterate, loincloth-wearing type of dude. Everything kind of crashes to a screeching halt when he is shown raping a twelve-year-old girl. Repeatedly. There’s not really a way for the book to recover any kind of sympathy after this point, as it is just far too repulsive for even ironic enjoyment. Sexually violating underaged girls is a major theme of the book, to the point where it starts to say something about Lin Carter, something more than a little distasteful.

One of the very strange contrivances of this book is that Tara never actually has regular sex. She manages to maintain her technical virginity, mostly because her various captors are too depraved to be interested in it. She has a lot of oral sex, and has anal sex (is anally raped, to be honest), but she never actually gets fucked. It has to be said that none of this is tremendously sexy, both because of Carter’s stilted prose, and because of Tara’s traumatized reactions to it. It’s not sexy to read about a teenaged girl vomiting after she is forced to suck a dick.

And in case you are thinking I exaggerate the redolent badness of the writing, let me grit my teeth and provide some examples. Lines such as “I explored the wrinkled flesh stretched tight over the twin rondures of his testicles.” or “I felt the hammerlike head of his maleness probe forcefully at the small wrinkled eye of my anus.” are like porn written by a fifteen-year-old fanfic author, not a fifty-year-old professional. To be fair, Carter’s line-by-line writing was never any good, but applying his sensibility to porn causes things to verge quickly into the grotesque.

Tara ends on an open note, clearly leading up to a sequel that would never come to be. Carter apparently published some Tara stories later on that may have been the beginnings of a full-length sequel, but there has never been a collection of them, thankfully. The book only went through one printing, and though I believe you can get a print-on-demand copy, the original paperbacks are rather valuable if they are in good shape. This is rare, as the cheaply-printed copies often simply fall apart (mine has lost the front cover, and the back cover will soon detach, even though it has not been read in almost 30 years). It seems Carter’s one work of rape porn shall remain more heard-of than read.