Carried Away: An SM Romance

Steamy leathersex is only the beginning when a cocky, jaded bottom and a once-burned Master come together for some no-strings bondage and SM. After their scene is over, a deeper hunger awakens, and they begin playing for much higher stakes, moving despite themselves toward a dynamic of Owner and owned. Set in New York City back in 1992, when gay leather and SM had emerged from the closet and seedy underground to become almost chic, only to be nearly destroyed by the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, "Carried Away" recreates a milieu as notable for the compassion gay men showed for their brothers as for the sensual excesses that anti-gay critics harped on.

This epic novel by longtime gay writer and activist david stein is replete with ferocious SM action, hard-core sex, and fiendishly restrictive bondage -- which he describes so well, you won't need photos to recreate it (assuming you have the right gear, a good space, and a willing partner ). But "Carried Away" is not only about SM, bondage, and sex, wonderful as all these are. More fundamentally, it is a love story -- a romance, if you will -- between two 30something gay men who are roughly equal in intelligence, ability, and character, but opposite in temperament and erotic preference.

Terry Andrews is a successful architect and all-around topman with a passion for bondage and the means to indulge it. Matt Stone manages a large bookstore, but he lives for the times when he can surrender control to a man he likes and admires. When they happen to be cruising at the Spike, the heaviest leather bar in Manhattan, on the same slow week night in 1992, neither is looking for a new partner, just some hot action. They get that, and much more, from each other: without intending to, they forge a deeper connection. Matt realizes that he needs to BELONG to someone, not simply let himself be played with and then released. For his part, Terry needs to OWN what he loves, and once he falls for Matt, enslaving him is the only option

For this new second edition, the author has carefully polished all of the quarter million words of the text without changing anything that made the novel so beloved by the thousands of readers -- both men and women -- of the original 2002 Daedalus edition, now out of print. With both its eros and its romance stemming from the same deep roots in human emotion, "Carried Away" is one of the most admired BDSM novels of all time, and this new edition fully delivers on the promise of Thom Magister's hot new cover art and of the intriguing new "Foreword" by Laura Antoniou, best-selling author of "The Marketplace" and its sequels as well as the hilarious crime novel spoof "The Killer Wore Leather."