Dangerous Desires

The Sugar Pit

by William Jackson

2024 (Cambridge Queer Press)

Jack, mid-thirties, lives in a small English city and works as a schoolteacher. He shares a modest home with his wife Lizzie, and they adore their young son Thomas. From the outside, their lives appear as normal and solid as any other average middle-class family. But beneath this facade, and unbeknownst to his wife, Jack holds a secret: he desires sexual contact with other men.

Jack masturbates to queer male pornography whenever he can, and in the past has occasionally snuck out to have brief same-sex encounters with other men he picks up at a bar, but he does not consider himself "gay" or "bi." His sense of self is firmly fixed within the public persona of himself as a married heterosexual man and father, with all of the privileges and expectations associated with that. He loves his wife; he´s just not that turned on by her. So he keeps his secret, compartmentalizing his life between public/private, between marital and domestic obligations and personal desire. For Jack, this "system" works.

Until it doesn´t. Near the beginning of The Sugar Pit, he decides to enjoy another real-life encounter while his wife and son are out of town for a couple of days. While on the hunt to find a suitable man to satisfy his carnal urges, he meets the young Billy, a hot young thing with platnium-blond hair and a bottomless sexual appetite. Jack is enthralled, and doesn´t want the sex to end. One night with Billy because two, then three; he even brings Billy into his home, a rule that he thought he would never break. He lies to his neighbor and co-workers, as well as to Lizzie, saying that he cannot join his family in the country as he originally planned, because he doesn´t want his sexy secret to end. Jack thinks he has it all under control. This long weekend with Billy is just fun, nothing serious--nothing that will get out of hand.

In her introduction to William Jackson´s novel, actor Britt Ekland calls The Sugar Pit a "gay Fatal Attraction." And a case could certainly be made for that: the action takes place in 1988, one year after the release of Adrian Lyne´s film starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. The plot of the book also echoes the arc of the film: Jack and the Douglas character, both married men, seek sexual excitement outside their primary relationships, and both think the fulfilment of secret desires is the answer to a dissatisfying marriage. Both believe they can start and end their trysts on their own terms, and both Billy and Close character refuse to comply. Their power is underestimated; neither Jack nor Douglas seem to know what to do when their (seemingly) ordered lives are faced with chaos.

Like Fatal Attraction, the narrative of The Sugar Pit is a kind of erotic thriller, a dark statement about the perils of marital infidelity. Some have read Lyne´s film negatively, that Close´s character reinforces stereotypes of female sexuality (ie "women are hysterical" and dangerous, while men are flawed yet essentially rational). A similar read could be applied to Jackson´s novel, taking place as it does during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Jackson includes excerpts of news headlines at the beginning of the chapters, as well as photographs that allude to moments in the story. The result is mysterious, creating an ominous mood but without implying any specific read or meaning into the implications of the plot. Is The Sugar Pit implying that homosexuality is "dangerous," while heterosexuality (or at least, the verisimilitude of heteronormativity) is "safe"?

Jackson´s novel reads more like an entertainment than any kind of cultural critique. He is good at mounting suspense, especially as we see how much Billy refuses to let go or to "move on," eventually threatening to destroy Jack´s ordinary life. Like Close´s performance i the film, Billy´s love is singularly focused and obsessive: the kind of love that approaches with the dangerous inevitability of a shark in the water while one is bleeding.

The first three-fourths of The Sugar Pit were quite enjoyable, just as good queer horror fiction out to be. The build up towards the events depicting on Jack´s birthday (I won´t spoil it) are pretty steady and excellent, yet the remainder of the novel didn´t quite satisfy in its resolution for me. Maybe this is just a matter of personal taste? Nonetheless, The Sugar Pit is often creepy as well as sexy to read.

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