QUIVER

Los Angeles-based playwright and screenwriter Learner’s debut hardcover is a polite sex aide for marrieds, lovers, celibates, and others who deny themselves realistically textured erotic fantasy on their own but enjoy looking at someone else’s dream-sex, especially if it’s as neatly written and controlled as this. Learner devises 12 interlocked stories, set in Sydney, Australia, with many of the same characters appearing in them, presented from a variety of sexual attack angles. In the first story, middle-aged dominatrix Sandra is married to dentist Brian and discovers’surprisingly—that she likes being dominated by her husband when he ties her to his dental chair and performs unusual feats with his electric brushes, etc. Soon enough Robert, chief foreman of a construction company, who has been watching all this daily from his hanging steel cage outdoors, decides to enter the fun. The tales cover hetero-, bi-, gay, exhibitionist, and SM activities, with the recurring characters enjoying new excitements, as well as a few huge sighs of nostalgia for bedrooms past. The story “Ice Cream,” for instance, suggests fresh uses for richly creamy and syrupy ice stuff . . . raspberry, vanilla, mocha, or chocolate, it hardly matters. Silk-pajama fare, mostly female-oriented.