In this suspenseful novel Perry Brass has subtly managed to create a horrifying picture of big-business tycoons, allowing his readers perhaps free reign to imagine the mindsets of such unscrupulous fat cats as are the Ghouls of Enron.
One of the two main characters, a tycoon, explains to the other how he relates to his fellow businessmen:
“The important thing is making these guys feel that they’re in control – I’m just helping, see? You can’t make ‘em feel like you’ve got ‘em by the cahoonies, even when you do ...”
Funny, I thought, after reading these lines. Some of these tycoons, these Fat Cat chiselers, realise they’ve got to treat other men – their business peers – with the deftness of a submissive wife.
I credit this book’s subtle storytelling approach because its characters at first seem rather ordinary types or proletarians, if you will. This helps make Allen’s viewpoint as the narrator accessible to all, however.
He chronicles his romantic attachment to another man through the stages of awareness he reaches while energised by curiosity and fear. At the start we learn that Allen considers himself hopelessly bland and uninteresting. He’s mistakenly convinced that having a smaller member excludes him from membership period.
His mysterious new lover, Destry, however, is a somewhat polished brute who assumes total control over Allen’s helpless soul. Allen’s absolute and almost immediate submission to Destry’s commands quickly refreshed my belief, as I read, that many or most people thoughtlessly approach their prospective lovers with far fewer questions than they might otherwise marshal prior to a tearful conversion to some seemingly unique religious cult.
Allen, fortunately, isn’t totally helpless. He possesses, at least, a subconscious view of himself as a victim of self-serving corporate-world robber barons. This, at least, helps make him suspicious of his demanding new comrade. The companies for which Allen, at twentysomething, had been working had been “owned by one group of faceless unseen financiers one day and another the next day. You never know who’s making out your paycheck now – or which country it comes from.”
In the meantime, the financial robber barons, like Destry, play their selfish games at the expense of little guys like Allen.
Male-male sexual episodes are woven into the fabric of Warlock. There are passionate moments that breathe through intense orgasms.
Without here explaining why, let it be said that some of Allen’s feelings of inadequacy finally begin to melt. His view of himself becomes transformed. He rediscovers himself, I was glad to read, as one who is “... more confident. More, you could say, ‘cocky’, which [he] learned had nothing to do with the size of [his] dick.”