DEVILSEED

Whole chunks of Yerby's latest junk-fest could be lifted out and reprinted as trashporn parody in the National Lampoon; unfortunately, the comedy here is entirely unintentional--and only sporadic. Mireille Duclos is a teen-whore in 1850 San Francisco, toiling at the rough Dirty Spoon brothel. (""She felt that elephantine rod of flesh prod against her, hot and hateful, errantly probing, seeking ingress. . . ."") She's rescued by Guillermo Kilpatrick--but, despite mucho passion, he won't marry her. (""Am I a person to you, Willy? . . . Not just--an apparatus of flesh--sufficiently warm, soft, wet for you to--push yours up into and--get your rocks off, as the miners say?"") So Mireille turns to lesbian joys with chum Paquita; she returns to whoring and tricks old judge Alain Curtwright into marriage; promptly widowed, she then uses her expertise to snare rising tycoon Andrew MacFarland. (""Welcome, huge sausage, into my little Turkish steambath. . . ."") But years later, when Mireille is a rich, proper matron, her sins will catch up with her: her two children turn out to be sinful, kinky types--especially her daughter Claire, she of the opium-den degradations and the passion for. . . Guillermo Kilpatrick. As Mireille says at the close, ""Everything that's wrong with you is--my fault. Born of the blood, the madness, I gave you. The seed of the very Devil himself, maybe, taken into my loins during some witches' sabbath of drunkenness and riot. . . ."" Larded with racial stereotypes, comic-book dialect, and verbose porno-prose: wall-to-wall garbage.