Pretty/Scary - The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

Contributed by member ElizabethBlue

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaure
ISBN # 0-452-26656-4
1983
Penguin Books

We all know the classic fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty: a spell is cast on a beautiful princess and only the kiss of a handsome prince can break it. In The Claiming of Sleepy Beauty, the first in the Beauty trilogy, the similarity to the fairy tale ends right there. Anne Rice, under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, writes an updated version of the classic and gives it her own erotic twists...

To call this book erotica would be an understatement, however. This is porn. Hot, steamy, well-written, somewhat disturbing porn. No, not THAT kind of porn: vacuum cleaner salesman calling on the horny, bored housewife. Not pool boy/gardener/OB-GYN porn. This is better. This is intelligent, but it goes too far beyond the usual boundaries of erotica for me to be able to comfortably call it that. And I think there’s no shame in calling something porn anyway. It simply implies something a little more extreme. Besides, erotica usually involves too damn much romance. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is, happily, short on romance.

There is no beating around the bush (no pun intended) in this book. It gets right to the point by the end of page two. Beauty has been asleep for one hundred years, after having pricked her finger on a spindle. Her story is well-known, and when the Prince arrives, he sees the evidence that others before him have died trying to awaken Beauty. Determined to succeed, (and we know he will because we know how the story goes and because he begins by showing us he is not a dolt like the other princes: he cuts away the thorny vines that kept the others from succeeding) the Prince sets to work on Beauty. First, he cuts away her clothing with his sword. He plays with her a little bit, studies her body. Then he spreads her legs, does his thing, and she wakes up.

Beauty takes it pretty well, I think. I’d have been screaming and trying to kill the Prince for what he’d done to me. But I’d have been in more trouble than Beauty. (Actually, I’d have kicked his princely ass and therefore would not have found myself in her predicament, but that’s neither here nor there. This is a fairy tale, after all, not real life.) All she did was cry and look pitiful, and that got her punished. The Prince, having “claimed” her as his own, proceeded to make her his sex slave. In return, Beauty’s father the King would have his kingdom restored. The King obviously thought this was a great deal: my riches returned if I let my naked-as-a-jaybird daughter go with this strange Prince? Sure! A no-brainer.

Sigh.

What follows after the initial chapter is page after page of sex between the Prince and Beauty, all in the form of punishments for her, which she, of course, comes to enjoy just a little in spite of herself. His favorite punishment seems to be spanking. Poor Beauty is spanked until her lily-white, tender-skinned ass is red, welted, bleeding. (She then gets turned on by a servant girl rubbing her with salve.) Will she never learn? Yes and no. As soon as she learns one lesson, there’s another to be taught. And perhaps she deliberately disobeys once in a while. So we can’t feel that sorry for her, can we?

As far as sexual novels go, this is one of the best. The descriptions are rich, the writing is engaging, and there’s plenty of kinkiness to go around.