THE MISADVENTURES OF DON KEE DONG & PHILLIP MIHOL

Carter offers an over-the-top gay erotic sendup of the secret-agent genre.

In a novel full of bawdily named characters, including Dutch operative Phillip Mihol, Bulgarian Ilov Giandik, and villainous Spanish mastermind Manuel Azramar, Vietnam-born spy Don Kee Dong sets out on a world-spanning mission to infiltrate a shadowy criminal enterprise known as HO. The espionage story is definitely secondary to the sex scenes involving the well-endowed hero, which are nonstop—and that’s the point, as Carter himself explains in an author’s note, in which he says that the novel is intended as a response to the antigay bias he experienced as a working librarian; he calls his book a “sexy adventure” that’s “all pure globetrotting queer joy!” But try as he might to simply be as provocative as an author could possibly hope to be, Carter succeeds in infusing the sexcapades with some substantive weight as well. Sure, it’s a world of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sex, but that’s not all it is; the book also shows a clear renunciation and rebuke of sexual assault amid the wildness. The narrative’s tongue-in-cheek tone is so pervasive that sudden serious allusions, as when Dong is asked to reconsider HO’s true nature, can be jarring: “I won’t say they’re all good, but during various purges such as the Inquisition and the Holocaust, HO saved countless lives,” says Mihol. “HO got thousands of queers and Jews out of Nazi Germany alone, and not only their members.” There’s also a lot of two-fisted violence in another nod to the secret-agent genre—particularly the brutality of Ian Fleming’s James Bond capers: “I went in as if to punch with my left and instead I threw dirt in his eyes with my right. I then broke his kneecap. That’ll hurt, I thought. As if on cue, he screamed in pain. I punched him again in the windpipe.”

Queer erotica with an absurd premise, pulpy fight scenes, and a few serious messages.