Love it or hate it, sex is at the center of every human relationships. Nobody will admit it until they're lying in bed with their hands raised in victory or silently telling themselves they've made the worst mistake of their life, yet nobody will be able to you how they put themselves if that position because sex is like the fight club. The first rule about sex is that nobody talks about it. Since Laura Lee Bahr doesn't give a shit about the stupid rules, she wrote a freakin' novel about sex and its inherent power over mortals. It's called Long-Form Religious Porn and it's wild and oddly moving.
Madeline Hunter has great ambitions for her screenplay. She has her eyes set on George Clooney being involved with the production and had no time whatsoever for her friend Dieter's strange, yet gut-wrenching drama: he is turning into a vampire. The story of her movie may or may not have been inspired by Dominique Colt's brutal BDSM murders of her fiancé and her gay boyfriend. That has to do with the story of Long-Form Religious Porn too, which really ties this entire episode of Americana together nicely. With a bow on top. It's hard to follow at times, but it all makes sense in the end.
I lost the plot about thirty pages into Long-Form Religious Porn. Fortunately, I found it again later and realized it was part of the plan. The novel features brutal, unannounced, European-cinema style viewpoint switching. I was initially put off but this, but Laura Lee Bahr made it a point of illustrating how people can unwittingly influence one another's life through these viewpoint switches. The links between every protagonist of Long-Form Religious Porn are very loose at the beginning, but they are there and they only get tighter, like bondage rope grinding over your genitals. Did I just say that? Anyway, don't get put off by the brutal viewpoint switching. Trust me, just keep reading.
My favorite thing about Long-Form Religious Porn is how gracefully it tackled the question of the importance of sex in human relationships. My favorite angle was perhaps the one I most identify with: depressed suburban animal Bert Snow. Basically, Bert wants to end himself without causing too much grief to his family because he lost all touch anything that causes him pleasure, but finds human connection looking for hardware to get the job done. Bert Snow ended up naked and bound not because he's a mindless pig slave to his instincts, but because he wanted to "feel" again. To confirm he was alive.
I've read Long-Form Religious Porn right after a spellbinding novel of crushing brilliance *, so it must've affected my reading somehow. I thought the voice of Laura Lee Bahr wasn't the showstopper in the novel, but rather the dissonance between the point she was trying to make about human sexuality and the very American treatment it ends up getting. So, Long-Form Religious Porn is more of a cerebral treat than an aesthetic pleasure or an emotional journey, but I think it was by design. Human sexuality in fiction works exactly like violence, it can't be on every page if you want to measure its weight and Laura Lee Bahr's Long-Form Religious Porn is an irreverent, yet moving and pertinent novel that treats the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
* I think I invented a new superlative.