The Unreprinted: The Tides of Lust/Equinox by Samuel R. Delany

by Ben Arzate

The Unreprinted explores the depths of books forgotten and fallen into the limbo of being out-of-print and only available as used copies. A place where strange and bizarre books can often be found. In this entry for Bizarro Central, we take a look at Samuel R. Delany‘s oddball first foray into erotica, The Tides of Lust/Equinox.

Samuel Delany is probably most well-known as an author of New Wave Science Fiction. His work pushed the boundaries of what could be done in speculative fiction. His novel Dhalgren is often considered his masterpiece, despite also being controversial for being dense and having a loose, confusing plot. If Delany is known for anything else, it’s also being an author of incredibly transgressive works. Hogg often comes up in conversation as one of the most extreme books in the English language. Delany’s first published work in this vein, however, was The Tides of Lust. 

Written more or less at the same time as Hogg, which wouldn’t see publication until the ’90s, The Tides of Lust was first published in 1973. Unlike Hogg, a deliberately off-putting work, The Tides of Lust makes several gestures towards being commercially viable erotica. It was put out by Lancer Books, a precursor of Kensington Books, and the title and basic plot summary could fool one into thinking it was a normal pornographic novel. Delany, however, seems keenly aware of this and goes out of his way to undermine and self-deprecate the novel as such. 

The most obvious part is the book is filled with subject matter most would not find erotic such urophilia, incest, and interracial encounters full of slurs and race-based degradation. The book also uses several techniques to alienate the reader from the story. It labels sections of the narrative as being “cartoons” to emphasize their artificial nature. The characters break the fourth wall several times, with one character wondering if this is a bad book towards the end. 

The plot could generously be called “picaresque,” but it’s more like it’s self-aware that it’s mostly random events that are excuses for sex acts to happen. The captain of a boat and his two young charges dock in a seaport town. There, they meet an artist and self-proclaimed magician named Jonathan Proctor who believes the captain to be the devil and that he must have seven orgasms before midnight to “usher in a new age of moral chaos.” Proctor leads the captain and a group of other corrupt characters from the town to an orgy with a duchess in a church. 

This pornographic plot is further undermined with a parallel plot of a rape and murder being carried out against a random woman and the crime being pinned on an innocent drifter who is executed for it. This seems to tie in with the recurring Faust motif, every chapter begins with an epigraph referring to Faust, with the world having to sacrifice morality for libertine freedom. 

The narrative further undermines itself, I believe intentionally, with many details. The unnamed captain is declared “the devil,” but is far from the most morally reprehensible character, or even the most significant. Proctor’s declaration of an age of moral chaos doesn’t seem to be any different than the age in progress when the narrative begins. Nearly every character is completely static and a caricature with names like Bull, Nazi, and Sambo. 

It would be easy to write this book off as self-parodying pornography. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. Just one that’s only going to appeal to a very specific type of reader. I very much get the impression this was something Delany wrote as a way of blowing off steam while working on the incredibly dark Hogg and the long and complicated Dhalgren. As far as I can tell, The Tides of Lust sold relatively well and received some positive critical attention when it was first released. It was, however, banned in the UK and landed its publisher in that country, David Britton of Savoy Books (a subject of a previous installment of The Unreprinted), in jail, with several copies being seized by the police. Despite that, it has been reissued at least once under Delany’s preferred title of Equinox.

Does The Tides of Lust/Equinox deserve to come back into print? I can’t call it some literary erotica classic in the vein of The Image or Story of the Eye, though I was entertained reading it despite the often unpleasant subject matter. It’s more of a curiosity for those already fascinated with the work of Samuel Delany. Rather than on its own, this is the kind of work that probably deserves to come back just as an ebook or in a collection of Delany’s older work

---