"What's the largest sexual organ in the body?

"Wrong--it's not the brain, which is merely the most important. It's the skin, which covers almost 20 square feet in the average adult male. And every square inch of it is excruciatingly molested in My Name Is Rand by Wayne Courtois, an erotic novel that takes tickling past horseplay, past foreplay, past fetish, and past eros itself into the realm of morbid obsession--and then past that into the realm of myth and many-layered metaphor.

"Serious s/m bottoms tend to divide into endorphin junkies, who get off on the natural opiates the body produces in response to stress, and adrenaline junkies, who get off on the speed-like chemicals the body produces in response to fear. Tickling fanatics like Courtois are clearly adrenaline junkies, because not only do they fear being helplessly tickled as much as they crave it, they crave it because it scares the shit out of them. Somehow, being in agony--we're not talking a friendly tickle and rub here but tickling torture--and out of their minds with the fearful anticipation of more agony to come is what gets them hard and dripping.

"In most of the book, the torture is nonconsensual, inflicted with malice by those in a position of power relative to their victims. The victims go from terror into insanity, without any stopover in endorphin-fueled ecstasy, and thence into unconsciousness--until they wake up and it all begins again.

"These scenes are conveyed in graphic, skin-crawling detail. Not being a tickling freak, or an adrenaline junkie, i wasn't turned on at all. Damn it, though, but Courtois can write. His sentences are chiseled, every word the perfect choice and placed exactly where it needs to be. He doles out information like drops of precum, just enough to clearly picture whatever place or action he's describing, never too much for the reader to glide through and on to the next vignette or flashback.

"How do you get to be a tickle freak, so obsessed with being tickled to death that you actually seek out men who might go that far with you? Apparently, judging from this book, you need (a) to be unusually ticklish to begin with and (b) to have been mercilessly tickled during your period of sexual awakening. It's a form of imprinting, i suppose, or a type of transference from the experience of being seized on as a tickling victim to the experience of being desired sexually.

"An old-fashioned leatherman might dismiss tickling as "kid stuff" or assume that because the tickle victim laughs as much as he screams, his distress isn't real. Courtois knows better. He knows that laughing, crying, and screaming are practically interchangeable responses in a serious tickling session--indeed, that part of what makes tickling so difficult to endure for long is that these responses, which in ordinary life express very different feelings, are all blurred together and indifferently become expressions of terror and outrage at an unspeakably intimate violation. The tickle victim, attacked at the level of his very nerves, gets his wires crossed and may laugh when the torture is at its most intense and cry when it levels off, with no control or intention in either case.

"My Name Is Rand is billed as "a bondage epic," and it's true that the narrator is practically always tied up or strapped down in some way or other. But the bondage is never an end in itself, only a means to frustrate the "fight or flight" response of an adrenaline surge and make him more vulnerable to his torturers. There's no sense that anyone is enjoying the bondage as such, only what it makes possible. As a bondage freak, i was disappointed. Removing the restraints as soon as the torture is over is like shucking off your bar leathers as soon as you get the trick through your door.

"On the other hand, the book's cover illustration of a pair of shapely bare feet menaced by a feather is fair warning that foot fetishists will find much food for fantasy inside. Not boot or shoe fetishists, mind you--Courtois evinces no interest in feet that aren't bare and thus available for tickling. He returns to this theme so many times, with so many variations, that i half expected to find a reflexology diagram included somewhere, indicating just which spots on the sole of the foot supposedly connect to which organs elsewhere in the body.

"Even though i love fantasy fiction when it's well done (and sometimes even when it isn't), i've come to prefer my erotica as realistic as possible. Part of what turns me on in reading an erotic fiction is the thought that this could happen just as it's described--it might even happen to me. Fantastic elements undermine this belief, dumping the erotic scenario into Never-Never Land and robbing it of much of its power. The first 30 pages of My Name Is Rand are entirely realistic, but the rest is mainly fantasy, though described in exactly the same realistic style, so that moving from one to the other has the logic of a dream. And even here there are flashbacks to the narrator's earlier experiences that seem wholly believable.

"Even when the context is entirely fantastic--a "Compound" in which several hundred men, women, and children seem to have nothing to do but endlessly tickle torture a handful of male victims-the narrative is believable psychologically, at least as far as the narrator's own feelings and reactions. The anonymous torturers are mostly just instruments for his personal journey into hell, if not altogether figments of his overheated imagination. When Rand is tied down to a table in a room full of naked teenage boys talking about how they're going to torture him, and he eventually starts begging, "Please, please, please," without its being clear whether he's asking for release or for them to get on with it already, you can feel his ambivalence as well as his mounting terror.

"Rand's odyssey provides elements that the thoughtful reader might wish to ponder, like the way skin both sets us apart from the rest of the world and allows it to affect us--much like speech, or storytelling, which can convey meaning or obfuscate it, or both at once. Or the way ticklishness itself signifies both a craving for and a fear of intimacy. Courtois himself is obviously a devotee of tickling, and probably a switch at that (most of the victims in the novel leap at the chance to tickle others), but a novel this finely crafted isn't just about tickling. The subtext is about how we connect with each other--or fail to--skin to skin."

—david stein, All-American Kink