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Showing posts with label Daoma Winston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daoma Winston. Show all posts

Monday, July 21, 2025

Paperback 1127: Golden Tramp / Daoma Winston (Beacon B 272)

 Paperback 1127: Beacon B 272 (PBO, 1959)

Title: Golden Tramp
Author: Daoma Winston
Cover artist: Uncredited [Harry Barton]

Condition: 8/10 
Value: $20


Best things about this cover: 
  • Her name is Gay? Bit on the nose, don't you think? I mean ... whither subtlety?
  • It's like she's eating his face with her neck. Some kind of weird reverse vampire.
  • "Your head feels so good, Steve!" "Mmmfrphywtuh"
  • There's something oddly, bizarrely, unexpectedly charming about the pink stripes on the pillow.
  • I approvingly acknowledge the hint (the barest hint) of garter hook.
  • I love the cover copy's anguished "WHY?" "Why oh why won't she give up this endless orgy of the flesh and join the endless orgy of the mind!?"


Best things about this back cover: 
  • Ransom note font, wtf?
  • OMG there really is a "Steve" in this thing. Nailed it!
  • "Maybe it was Tom who turned Gay from men." So ... he turned Gay ... gay? Seriously, the protagonist's name is not helping you, Daoma.
  • I'm not sure "tete-a-tetes" means what you think it does, Daoma. Unless ... "tete" ("head") is a euphemism for some other body parts that they're putting ... together ...
  • Holy shit, plot twist! Peter covets Jonathan!? Who the fuck is Jonathan? You can't just drop Peter's queerness *and* a new character into the very last sentence. I don't even care about Gay anymore. I need to know about Peter and Jonathan! I hope they're happy (but since they're gay in a 1950s paperback, safe bet is that they are probably not, in fact, happy).
Page 123~
"Well, you know what he did? Went off and married one of those drive-in girls in the shiny shirts, and dimpled knees showing. And the funniest thing happened. It turned out she's some kind of an heiress or something. Couldn't have happened at a better time, or to a nicer guy."
Man, it's like Daoma Winston's got a barreful of premises for novels and she's just gonna dump them all into one book. Now I need to know about the heiress who is also somehow a dimple-kneed shiny-shirted drive-in girl ... which is apparently a type? I want to live inside a late '50s Beacon paperback, if just for a day. It sounds wild.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and BlueSky]
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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Interlude—people send me books sometimes

After buying a book from me, reader JamiSings was inspired to send me a bunch of campy old paperbacks: several Agatha Christies, a romance novel, and a couple of sex books ("Sex Games that People Play" —about the unsexiest book I've ever briefly looked at—and "The Sensuous Woman" by J, which I've heard of and which is quite graphic in places). Of these six, I thought two of them deserved special notice.

First, the harrowing tale of Vincent Price's elaborate scheme for revenge against those bastards at Godiva Chocolate:

PB77451.PerilEnd


And second, the touching story of a woman with a secret passion for dry-humping enormous cloves of garlic:

Lanc73723.Traficante

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]
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Thursday, December 6, 2007

Paperback 51: Royal Giant 27

Paperback 51: Royal Giant 27 (PBO / PBO)

Title: Confessions of a Psychiatrist / The Woman He Wanted
Author: Henry Lewis Nixon / Daoma Winston [!!??]
Cover artist: Uncredited / Uncredited [but apparently signed "Uppwal..."]


Best things about this cover (where to begin!):

 Confessions of a Psychiatrist:

  • I love how the halo of light makes her look angelic, while the positioning of her hands ... let's just say that the less disturbing act she seems to be pantomiming involves strangling children.
  • "You are getting sleepy ... hey, it's working!"
  • Are they in a boudoir, or his office? Or does it matter anymore?
  • What kind of bed is that? It's very low, and appears to consist only of a frame and a giant pillow.

The Woman He Wanted:

  • Boobs! Blood! Yikes!
  • LOVE the woman on the couch: "Best seat in the house! I'll just lie back here, cross my legs awkwardly, kick over my glass of whiskey, smoke a cigarette, and watch the brutality."
  • "Daoma Winston" - I wanted to say that that is the ugliest, worst pseudonym ever, and yet ... "She" appears to have gone on to a long and successful career writing gothic / horror / fantasy stuff. Who knew? Notice how this bibliography of "her" work does not quite stretch back to The Woman He Wanted.

Best things about this back cover:

Copy writing at its histrionic, purply best:

Confessions:

  • "Strange rite of nudity" - Nudity has its own rites now??? I am so behind the times.
  • "Titillating treatise" = racy alliteration
  • "Unblushing frankness" = code for sex sex sex - actually (a side note) "frank(ness)" is common in cover copy for books about all kinds of, let's say, "non-normative" sex-related behavior and conditions (e.g. gayness, transvestism, trans-sexuality, etc.). As I've said before, Kinsey gave this weird license to the publishing world to let loose with "educational" sex fiction.

Woman:

  • He works at a "filling station" ... and he's "a crude man" ... HA ha
  • STELL!! STELL!! (shout heard in sex-reversed version of "A Streetcar Named Desire")
  • In case you missed it, his name is .... Stell. WTF?
  • "... taunting him to splurge his passion on one of his other women" = too "frank" for my taste

RP
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