Bill Ward BDSM Art

Inner Circles of Pain
a novel by Clive Bedford
illustrated by Bill Ward
Bizarre Books BB-140
Eros Publishing Co., Inc.
Wilmington, Delaware
1976

optimized
and
optimized pictures-only version

Separated from her half-brother Mark when they were children, Jean Gresham runs into him in a Los Angeles bar. A week later, he appears at her hotel and tells her the bizarre saga of all that befell him since they parted, 21 years earlier.

A journalist, Jean records Mark's account of a sometimes sinister odyssey through a brutal life of misuse, exploitation, lust, love, loss and his current indenture in a peculiar night club act. He accepts the torment of his circumstances as recompense for his misdeeds and wanton self-indulgence. After the death of his father, he came under the control of several overbearing women and men, most of whom used the pretty young man as a character in their own diabolical plots.

To acquire more of his father's estate, step mother Sophie places young Mark under the unchecked control of Caterina, who hates him because she mistakenly believes he's German. At remote Gaunt House in Cornwall, she dresses him in tight, rubber-lined corsets, and other rubber garments, isolating him from the world. He develops strong corset and rubber fetishism and his obsession with these objects becomes an essential aspect of his solitary sex life.

Deprived of education, he's sent to the South of France to be tutored by Madame Dupont and her two mischievous daughters. Madame also insists that Mark, who she calls Mimi, dress in corsets and rubber. Inside his tight rubber shorts, the daughter's fingers play with their guest's genitalia and their mother spanks all three. On their Mediterranean beach, he learns to swim and a lot more.

At a party, he meets handsome Don Angelo, a wealthy Spaniard who believes Mimi is a girl. When he learns of the true gender identity, he takes the lad to his castle. There, Mark learns about love, man-to-man, and has the best years of life.

Don Angelo's sexual preferences include having slender Mark dress in a tight leather costume with an open bottom. After he's strapped to an old wood frame, Don Angelo causes exquisite agony with a steel-cored whip. Then, they have wild sex.

After Don Angelo dies in an accident, despondent Mark winds up in Albania dressed as a girl. He's incarcerated, tortured and interrogated as a spy.

Returning to England, he meets Miss Dominic, who calls him Darling. She dresses him as a girl and spanks him with a cane.

The back cover of the novel contains a warning:

Prepare yourself for a journey into the uncharted wilderness of Eros country — a place where desire is often a matter of life and death. Where passion is a pulse beat away from the Last Rites. Where the whip and the erection are inextricably bound together in a deadly game of pleasure/pain.

If you are weak or squeamish, you are advised not to travel the pages of this bizarre tale — a diary of a terrible and terrifying descent into the inner circles of a sexual inferno.
It is a tale of cross-dressing, of exotic fetishism, of ruthless bondage, and of unbearable sexual torment.
It is the odyssey of one man who became the international victim of the world's most ruthless degenerates. From England, to France, to Spain, to the United States they indulged his penchant for pain.

Mr. Bedford creates a character with a voice and viewpoint as he unravels his first-person account of abuse, exploitation and self-gratification. Varied feelings of guilt seize the protagonist, and help him cope with the cruelty that's directed at him.

The story has strong tight-lacing, rubber and spanking elements. Episodes expose Mark's fondness for cross-dressing and pain as prelude to release. While at least one chapter describes his involvement in homosexual liaison, he's not shown to have any conventional sex.

With a slightly British cast, the easy-to-read story resembles Voltaire's Candide, who characterizes her misfortunes and misuses as for the best. Mark embraces the inverse: he deserves a horrible life as punishment for his sins.

The prose was edited. Spelling and punctuation revised. Long sentences and paragraphs were pared into smaller units. The text was re-set for the ebook iteration. 43,000 words.

Illustrations depict incidents in the story and the grand female figures of alluring sadists and the shapely protagonist. As permitted by story content, page sequence was revised to position each picture close to related prose. Only some incidents in the narrative appear in pictures.

In the paperback book, a caption beneath each picture describes the scene. In the ebook, complete pictures were placed on the right side of pages and captions on the left.

Mr. Ward's sensuous art is optimized on more than 40 pages. Virtual enlargements of image segments expose figure features, action and fetish elements. This presentation technique reduces the need for zooming and scrolling.

A second ebook contains only pictures.

All new scans.

Two optimized ebooks, delivered by download from your 30th Street Graphics account.