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The Horse Mistress |  | Author: Justine Paris
Publisher: Olympia Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $8.44
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Seller: thermite-media
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 861794
Media: Paperback
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5 x 8 x 0.4
ISBN: 159654371X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781596543713
ASIN: 159654371X
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"She's my daughter and I'm going to make a whore out of her!" my father screamed. And that weekend, he did--though my girl friends at school had already taught me plenty. And after my father, there were always men for me. Too many men, even, and not one of them really good enough for me. And that is why I fled to the country --where I found Prince (or did he find me?) -- my beautiful stallion, my wonderful lover, who gave me what I needed so deeply, so badly, so completely--who filled me, emptied me, soaked me, exhausted me--made me deliriously happy, and completed the educational job started by my father.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Thought provoking and interesting February 29, 2008
Gradient Vector Field (MA, USA)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
Not a review title you would expect from a novel classified under the realm of erotica. I know, and especially of this nature. However, ultimately that's how this book left me. Strangely by looking at the title I thought it would be one story, also reading the back of the book leads you to believe it is all one tale of one very depraved girl. That's not true though, the book is split into two different stories. I can't see any logical link to them, and if the second story is the same girl in the first then it is never referenced in the second story.
The first story was by far the lesser of the two in quality. It is written entirely in the second person and the female character it is about was someone I really had a hard time getting into. She was a girl, basically left on her own in a boarding school, but she wanted to hang out with all the rich girls. She really had very little involvement with her parents and probably one of the roots of her issues with turning to a sexual release. She, I found, clearly lacked any general sense and would even go so far as to do things with her friends' fathers when she went to visit them. Eventually a weekend comes along where she is forced to go to her father's house or stay at school with the orphans. Since staying with the orphans is apparently social suicide, she opts for her father even though it is made quite clear he disgusts her. Ultimately this ends up turning towards an incestuous story between the girl and her father. I found the story incredibly tiring because the girl treated everything as a competition and had myriad conspiracy theories to figure out who was winning. Regardless of the fact I didn't like that character, I did appreciate the author giving us, the readers, an inside track to this mixed up girl's mind. I feel that if I didn't have these illogical insights, I wouldn't have been able to figure out why she did the things she did. She was determined to never let her father win... in whatever competition she had devised for them, though I'm not sure he was even aware there was one. She does make a decent attempt to analyze her psyche as to what love is and how that plays into love from a parent. Since her parents were barely involved with her, she doesn't have much of a reference point. Though, for those people who were really looking for a depraved tale of debauchery, this one doesn't really run the full gamut. The author lays out that the mother was quite amorous, and still is, so it is even questionable as to if this man claiming to be her father is actually the girl's father. You never know one way or another, so this may not be a tale of incest in the end. It's nothing like "Marie du Franval" by De Sade, which was a full on tale of such through and through.
The second story "Days in the Country" is by far the best story and the most thought provoking. This story is told completely in the first person and feels quite a bit like a diary recollection of things that happened. It was so realistic that it really makes me wonder if the tale was true or not. I mean it does have an old copyright of the 1970's and the characters are interacting in the correct time frames. Essentially we are introduced to a girl who clearly grew up in the 1960's and was heavily involved in the "beat generation" or "hippy movement" if you want to call it. Linguistically it caters to the slang of this period, and not being from that time frame I didn't know what all of it meant. So there were some sections that were confusing for me, and I think others could have the same problem with reading it so long after it was originally published. However, I think anyone who has been through a general history class easily knows the more popular tenet of "free love" presented by this movement.
It's interesting to get a look into this society and the first person viewpoint makes me feel like it really happened to someone. Like the first story, this girl comes from a broken home as well, where her parents really weren't involved with her life. So she ended up hanging out with (the wrong) people and eventually ended up in the hippy life where sex was for kicks and essentially nothing more. She started in on these things when she was thirteen and by the age of nineteen (her age in the story) she felt she had done everything possible. She was certainly a nymphomaniac and meshed with the society's philosophy of free love, but one summer she decided to go to the country and visit her grandmother. It was very different from her faster paced life in New York, so it gave her time to contemplate. Her grandmother and grandfather used to breed horses, but after her grandfather died most of the horses were sold. She used to like to ride, but would never ride a stallion, only mares. However, when she finally arrived she found out her grandmother still had one horse left, a stallion named Prince.
After her first day there she wanted to ride Prince, so they rode out to the picnic grove. On the ride she was overwhelmed with feelings of the animal magnetism. She never felt like this before, because from her world view you weren't supposed to really feel anything. Eventually her mind degenerates further and begins to toy with the idea of bestiality. Obviously she succumbs to the temptations and it's the greatest kick of her life, but there's another feeling there. She ponders how much she connects with the animal because the act is so primal and a great amount of time is spent with her ponderings of love and what it could mean. This is exactly what I was looking for out of such a book, because the writing should give the reader a unique perspective into the characters motivations, or at least enough insight to piece items together. At this point she feels the need to research what she has done and remembers that her grandfather had a large collection of esoteric books of myriad topics. I rather liken myself to the grandfather, since now that I own this book, I could have grand children and I could be known as the grandfather with esoteric books!
However, she is also introduced to another young man, Gewain, which really makes her mind reel. She spends a good portion of the text trying to figure out what love is, because from her perspective love is not something she should feel. It is indelibly thrust into our heads that the hippy generation is centered about feeling nothing, it's almost bordering on nihilism, except for the voracious amounts of copulation between many people. But our character is beginning to feel something, and it is referenced against her time with her horse, Prince. She finds herself more and more with Gewain, but she feels bad for ignoring Prince and it really becomes an emotional dilemma for her.
The book is decently graphic during the love scenes of both species, so if that is your main interest in picking this up then you'll be satisfied, that's not really my motivation. Like me, everyone will probably be caught off guard with the first story and probably equally disappointed with it. The second text, if you want some interesting psychological musings on this type of act will really make it worth your while. Frequently the character justifies the acts to herself, referring to herself as "a healthy girl." As if a healthy girl is supposed to do such things constantly. However, I think that is a faux point to justify her growing up with such an excess of those things. The characters inner musings are fascinating as she tries to piece together the logic of what she's done and why.
As you can no doubt tell, the point of acquiring such a text was to get into the psychology and philosophical affects, whether they be adverse or beneficial. Maybe that makes for a worse perversion since I am attempting to intellectualize this type of writing. Regardless, it really makes you sit and think about the concepts of sexuality in general, which is what I was setting out to answer. While this doesn't have answers, it gives some good food for thought. This is exactly what I walked away feeling for De Sade when I read "Justine" and I think this book brings depravity to a different extreme, but keeps the philosophical concepts at a high enough level without treating it's readers as fools.
 Don't waste your money May 27, 2008
Tanya Barrett
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book was really built up and the title is very misleading there is only 1 scene the book is not about the woman and the horse it is about her with everyone else. It was very boring.
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