Paperback 420: Beacon B585F (PBO, 1963)

Title: Smoldering Women
Author: Burton St. John
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• Everything pales before the righteous name of Burton St. John.
• I think the cover artist took the title a bit too literally—I can barely see the strangely posed women and their amorphous underthings for all the smoke.
• "Hey Judy, do you smell smoke? [sniff, sniff] Hmm, it's not coming from my armpits ..."
  
• Wow, that tagline doesn't mess around. It gets right down to business. Between "bizarre" and "depraved" ... and the mother pimping her daughters in a burning building ... this cover is failing at its putative goal of turning me on.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Jessica was FRANK!" — dingdingdingding. Add another to the "frank" collection ...
  
• So the mom isn't whoring out her daughters so much as offering them up as subjects of quasi-medical experimentation. If clinically treating a frigid woman and her nymphomaniac sister is really what "most men dream about," then the "stunning answer" to the question "What is really abnormal?" is "me." I've never dreamed about those two in my life.
  

I just read the last page of this book. It involves a white man telling a black girl to give up on her dream of being his lover, advising her to marry the (black) "stable boy," but then fucking her anyway. So, instead of Page 123, I give you Page 151:

A beam of sun laid a spear of gold across her breast. He stepped toward her. They came together in a bursting flood of delight.

The End. So either they fucked or they detonated themselves in some kind of suicide pact.

P.S. "A beam of sun laid a spear of gold" should be arrested for crimes against metaphor.

~RP

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