As you know, sleaze literature was a major subset of mid-century paperback fiction, therefore we delve into such books regularly. Also, they tended to have good cover art. This uncredited effort for Dan Brook’s 1966 romp Peggy’s Sexcess has all the information you need if you look closely. We didn’t. We got the impression of an interesting cover but didn’t examine it further. To get right to it, in this piece of fiction, the eponymous Peggy is fourteen. Look at the art again. You didn’t think “underaged” at first, did you, but now it’s clear, right? We’ve seen the cover mentioned on another website as an “all-time favorite.” Guess they didn’t look too closely either. And crucially, we didn’t read the rear cover at all. We almost never do, because we don’t like any plot points to be given away. In this case the most important plot point is right there in yellow and red: “14.”
But not knowing that, we proceeded blithely along, and even the fiction fooled us for a while, because at first it’s totally about Peggy’s nineteen year-old sister Nancy, and it’s even written from her point of view. She runs away to the big city from an abusive stepfather and becomes a nude model. We literally went back to the beginning thinking, “Weird. Did they transpose names somehow? Is the book really about Nancy instead of Peggy?” Stuff like that happens sometimes in this tier of literature, trust us. But no—Nancy becoming a nude model is just the lead-in to Peggy running away too, joining her sister, and also becoming a nude model. And a porn actress. And the plaything of a dominatrix. As it currently stands, it’s legal in the U.S. to write anything as fiction. It’s a different thing to read it. As a matter of principle we don’t quit books, so we finished Peggy’s Sexcess, but we absolutely will not recommend it. It’s excessive.
