The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine

Starred review from November 30, 2015
Kneen (Steeplechase) delivers on the promise of unusual, science-fictional eroticism with this daring adventure. Holly White is fervently dedicated to an ideal of abstinence to which her friends only pay lip service. Nicholson has inherited a scientific secret that governments consider a threat to humanity. Like everyone else on Earth, Holly is unaware of this danger—as ignorant, in fact, as she is of everything to do with sex. But that’s about to change. Her slow journey toward sexual enlightenment is beautifully rendered in lingering detail. Thanks to a book club that turns out to only read explicit books, Holly is guided to her destiny with Nicholson and his titular machine by treasures of erotic literary history. The combination of sexual awakening, secret societies, and lost technology, wrapped up in Kneen’s loving treatment of her subject, character, and story, makes for a remarkably pleasing read. The conclusion is wildly imaginative and surprisingly satisfying. The characters are delightfully varied, including many from groups that are underrepresented in erotic fiction, and each is more fascinating than the last. The absurdity of the sci-fi thriller setup propels the protagonists to extremes of sexual behavior, but it also acts as a contrast to the erotic content, rendering the pleasures of the flesh simple and charming by comparison with the elaborate plot. Kneen encourages the reader to delight in sexuality that is by turns innocent, gleeful, and cheerfully obscene.

November 15, 2015
In an unabashedly erotic novel, Kneen (Steeplechase, 2013, etc.) follows the science fiction-flavored adventures of a young woman whose sexual awakening is set into motion by works of classic erotic literature. Holly White is fascinated by sex but remains a virgin. This is partially because she and her best friends--all beautiful, privileged college students--have made a pact of chastity and wear rings engraved with the words "true love waits." It's also partially because when Holly finds herself aroused, a glowing blue wetness emerges from between her legs, and this abnormality, a potential "beacon" of lust, shames and disturbs her. When she stumbles into an invitation to join Sex Club, a book club that discusses the erotic classics, she finds both intellectual excitement and the nerve to pursue her sexual freedom. At first, Holly's explorations follow the predictable narrative of a girl flinging aside her cloistered youth for a bohemian discovery of womanhood, complete with endless and tiresomely described trysts. As the novel progresses, her escapades become stranger and stranger, and the story takes a breakneck left turn into a bizarre realm of science-fiction lunacy. Kneen attempts to weave threads of this strangeness throughout the novel--dwelling on Holly's ectoplasmlike affliction and dipping into a secondary storyline about a scientist and the machines he built to collect the energy of orgasms--but the surreal elements feel unbalanced and awkward. They get in the way of the novel's most pleasurable aspect: an infectious enthusiasm for the books that fuel the emotional action. Reading about Holly reading James Salter, Angela Carter, and a slew of others and finding the experience so wholeheartedly transformative makes the reading list in the back of the book irresistible. An uneven novel whose disparate parts make a sexual awakening ridiculous and sometimes apocalyptic but that offers a keen appreciation of the erotic writing of others.

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January 28, 2015