Rabbit's Leap

GAY NOVEL

Rabbit's Leap
James Hagerty

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Reviewers' Comments:

Rabbit's Leap is a rollicking tale of lust, murder, and desire pushed to the brink of madness. It is a dark comedy whose cast of characters appear to be the illegitimate children of television's Dynasty and a gay porn magazine.
The scene is San Diego in the 1970's, a time of psychedelic drugs, social upheaval and sexual freedom. Sammy, a horny but rather naive high school biology teacher, encounters Ivan, the leather top, and is abruptly dropped into a world of bikers, transvestites, priests, slaves and the not-so-genteel elite. Will this unwitting hero survive the adventure which will take him from elegant restaurants to a well-equipped S&M dungeon? And what links could there be between a leather top, a priest, a transvestite dress designer, and Sammy himself?
The novel contains scenes which are certainly not for the squeamish---cruelty, pain, and power are the driving forces of the bizarre inhabitants of this world. But Sammy also finds pleasure, friendship, affection and humour in his fast-paced romp through wonderland. Rabbit's Leap is silly, sexy, funny, provocative and strange---and oddly satisfying.
I had anticipated another comic book story with the same tired stereotypes of gay life that we've all grown to love/hate. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the vary capable hands of an intelligent novelier whose characters live and breathe. James Hagerty proves himself to be an engaging story teller who strives to entertain and challenge the reader, and who does so with wit and skill.
--- Ralph Higgins, Wayves
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Sammy is the Alice in Rabbit's Leap, James Hagerty's sadomasochistic wonderland. Bound by his closeted, ex-catholic world-view, this high school teacher stalks the night in search of anonymous tricks in bathrooms and outside of trashy bars. Quickies with glory hole, transvestite tramps and one-night stands with sailors on shore leave are his usual entrées. However, that is about to change.
When he meets Ivan at the YMCA, Sammy takes his first step into a twisted world of S&M. Ivan is a dominant master with a fully-stocked "slave stable." He is also a man with a dark and painful past. What he has in common with Sammy is a love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church, firmly rooted in his childhood. As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that is the source of his perverse eccentricities. Ivan was the sex toy of the priest who is now the presiding bishop of the diocese. Indeed Catholicism, black magic, and paganism seem to be thinly veiled animus behind much of the intrigue and fetish of Rabbit's Leap. Those who may deride the lack of erotic content fail to understand that this is primarily a fetish fantasy. Blood, sweat, and iconoclasm are the main tools of the author's eroticism.
The people Sammy meets as he travels "down the rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world" are brawling biker-gangs, feuding families, frightening bull-dykes, a chapel of vestal drag queens, tragic transvestites, misleading millionaires, and perverted priests. And these are only some of the inhabitants of Hagerty's land of pleasureable pain. LSD trips, black magic sex rituals, sadomasochistic nuptials, and bloodletting are their activities of choice. The images are at time humorous and at other times horrifying.
Fluid, poetic, and intellectual, Hagerty's writing is most likely to appeal to those whose primary sexual organ is their brain. This is unquestionably thinking man's porn. Hagerty expects us to be at least as turned on by what his charactes are thinking and saying as by what they are doing---perhaps even more so.
Be prepared for fast-paced, wordy passages that are occasionally a challenge to decipher. Stream of consciousness, intermittent poetry, and virtual surrealism are among the variety of avant-garde styles the story flows in and out of. If the content isn't too risqué for us, the style well may be.
Rabbit's Leap is not the kind of book to read for a compelling plot. Shock and surprise are its main goals and the plot is only their vehicle. This story line has all the many twists and turns that its name implies---like a rabbit hole. As with Rocky Horror Picture Show (with which it has been compared), it is primarily a story of transformation---the transformation of the main character along with the reader.
Since this transformation cannot really be called cathartic, it can only be called comic. The protagonist goes from being a pathetic human being to being a triumphant, sadomasochistic hero. Ironically, the real victory is simply that he has "come out" as the real "pig boy" he is.
---Brøn Thorson, X-Factor, Phoenix
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Before he drops down the rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world of S/M, family feuds, and royal court and biker club rivalries, Samuel leads the usual life of a closeted biology professor—washroom sex with drag queens, occasional sailor pickups outside seedy bars, and, one life-changing day, a lusty encounter with Ivan the Top inside the dependable YMCA. When he rolls out the other end of James Hagerty's truly twisted genre-rattling tale of gay weddings gone awry, priests unfrocked, and many parts clamped, Sammy has Mastered the world in a most entertaining way.
—Richard Labonte, Editor, Best Gay Erotica.
Not since the Rocky Horror Picture Show has anything like this novel intruded on the scene, I guess. Told by a once repressed biology teacher, who really comes up in the world, and who has a fated affair (so to speak) with a leather stud who ends up at the nuptial altar in a special chapel for sainted drag sisters except that—and there's the stud's half-brother with his international reputation and his millions who isn't really what he appears, but seems to favor a doomed transvestite until—and there's that bloody dungeon scene— Well, that gives you a small taste of an adventuresome novel that may strike your funny bone even as it horrifies you.
— Bill Lee, author of Leather Rogues

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