Review: Dark Secret Love by Alison Tyler

It's my turn to join in the big Dark Secret Love blog tour, with a review of Alison Tyler's novel. For all the blog tour stops and the chance to win a fabulous prize, check out her blog post all about it. Here goes:

So you’ve got kink at first sight (repeatedly), you’ve got a girl swept off her feet by a rich guy with a swanky home, you’ve got the obligatory BDSM club scene. You’ve got plenty of naughty bits simmering away continually throughout the story. A variety of hot men (and another woman), and the heroine’s escape from a life of ‘lights-out, minty-fresh’ sex, before she finds ‘the one’. Not to mention an exploration of the difference between being dominant and being an asshole, and of the nature of the BDSM ‘punishment’ game and what it means to ‘win’ or ‘lose’.

But this is no formula erotic romance with a bit of trendy spanking thrown in. Dark Secret Love is semi-autobiographical, said to be based on Tyler’s private diaries. Which bits are real, which bits embellished, which pure fiction, and what has been left out, the reader cannot know. But the novel has a matter-of-fact realism at its core. Every description of the BDSM elements rings true. Samantha is no cardboard cut-out; she’s a normal, complicated, contradictory woman who knows she’s sexually submissive and knows what she wants from a man. And as her love story develops, so does her life as a writer penning stories of kinky fantasies and further blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

The book has a tone of no-nonsense honesty and a fast pace with a terse style. In my notes as I read it, I wrote ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’, for Samantha gets through quite a list of encounters. I also wrote ‘certainly not romanticised (thank fuck!)’ for it is a gritty and sometimes challenging read. But despite its spareness, the novel is bursting with the sort of detail that makes it compelling, keep-you-up-at-night reading. At one point, one of her lovers, Nate, is encouraging her to develop her writing career and he says, ‘Your writing has this sort of breathlessness to it. You can tell there’s a soul behind the words.’ And if Nate says that of Samantha, then I’d say it of Tyler.

Samantha charts her life from high school, concentrating on her search for fulfilment of her kinky sexuality and her development as a writer. She has some fun with a couple of dominant guys before settling down to three messed-up years with Byron. Byron is dominant in all the wrong ways, making Samantha feel she is always a failure, while also making her ashamed of her sexual desires. He is the ‘normal’, socially acceptable guy she thinks she is meant to fall for and settle down with. Fortunately, she breaks free of his cycle of soul-crushing manipulation and gets what she needs from other men, eventually committing to Jack.

Now, here’s a little conundrum I suffered as a reader: I didn’t always like Jack, the hero of the tale. And if this was formula romance, I would not be surprised or particularly perturbed by that. But now I’m worried that it’s a real person I’m not always liking and this throws me into some strange metaphysical paradox because if he's Samantha's happily ever after, then I want to like him. One example of him bothering me is when Jack and Samantha get together for a second time, she is already seeing housemate Nate, who is portrayed as a really decent guy. And Jack gets annoyed because Samantha wants to do the decent thing and explain to Nate what’s happening. To me, it felt like Jack was annoyed at Samantha for having integrity.

But at its heart, that conflict is what you would expect from a realistic story, a possibly real-life story, rather than the erotic romance formula of 'chuck in a conflict for your characters to overcome'. This is a tale of the development of a deeply BDSM relationship between two realistic, complicated people. A relationship that gives the participants nowhere to hide, a relationship in which nothing can be secret and feelings cannot be buried – shame, desire, joy, hurt, jealousy – and in which each partner is laid bare to their core. And that’s a very brave thing to share with the world at all, wherever the text lies on the line from fiction to reality.

I was given a free copy of Dark Secret Love: A Story of Submission to review by publisher Cleis Press. You can buy it in paperback or ebook at Cleis Press, Amazon, and Amazon UK.