Praise for Santa Steps Out
"The only two rules in Santa Steps Out are that everything is sacred and nothing is sacred. I wish I could hope to ever attain one-thousandth the perversity of Robert Devereaux's least toenail clipping. I also wish—despite its enticing/cautionary subtitle—that this Santa story might be read to children everywhere on Christmas Eve."
—Poppy Z. Brite
"There are scenes from this book that will haunt me forever. I know I'll never innocently or absent-mindedly suck on a candy cane again. Reading this book made me want to bitch-slap Robert Devereaux. So icky, yet so magnificently rendered."
—Elizabeth Engstrom
"The kind of fairy tale that could make Walt Disney burst from his cryogenic ice cube and go on a mad killing spree. Hard to describe, impossible to categorize, and great, wicked fun to read! Make this book one of your holiday purchases, sit down by the fire and read it aloud to the family. Well...maybe not the whole family...but at least the ones who are already too screwed up for it to make any difference. Heh-heh."
—Ray Garton
"A delirious slice of Nabokovian porno whimsy. Wholesome, savory, weird and blasphemous, all at the same time—just like the best sex. I believe in Robert Devereaux."
—Tim Lucas
"Let Robert Devereaux shimmy down your chimney and you'd better watch out—Santa Steps Out is as twisted as the stripes on a candy cane."
—Norman Partridge
"The first time I read a Robert Devereaux story, I knew that his keepers had been spiking his oatmeal. Santa Steps Out is evidence that they've drastically upped the dosage. A wildly erotic fable tracing the consequences of Saint Nick's seduction by the Tooth Fairy, it is by turns sexy, hilarious, horrifying, magical, gross, compassionate, appalling, brilliant, sophomoric, irresistible and infuriating...and the only prospect more daunting than turning each page to see where the shameless Devereaux plans to take us next is looking forward to the inevitable shrieks of dismay from those unwary readers who expected something with a cuddly safe G Rating."
—Adam-Troy Castro
"Once upon a time we believed: In Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and magic. And then we grew up. Well, Robert Devereaux has given all that back to us in Santa Steps Out. As promised on the cover, it is a Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups—full of magic and terror, death and miracles. It is also so much more. Santa Steps Out gives us a glimpse behind the placid scenery we thought we knew as children...and what a glimpse it is! So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, snuggle up in your warmest blankie, and settle back for a reading experience the likes of which you've never had. One warning should accompany this book, however: KEEP THIS and all other dangerous objects OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN!"
—P. D. Cacek
"In its violation of our sensibilities and our cherished childhood icons, in its topping of its over-the-top scenarios, Santa Steps Out manages to be at once fascinating, funny, and enlightening. Devereaux's most outrageous achievement is that as he destroys our childhood myths, he rebuilds them in a twisted yet equally magical and compelling way."
—Jeanne Cavelos
"Exactly the kind of dangerous book that a small press should publish: the kind that makes mainstream publishers sweat."
—Hank Wagner
"Robert Devereaux is a master of vivid scene-setting, especially gory scenes and sex scenes. There is a lot of sex in this book—mostly happy, lubricious sex that is sometimes downright amazing. Prepare for a strange and stimulating ride when you hop in the sleigh with Santa and witness all his adventures."
—Fiona Webster
"Never until now have so many sacred childhood deities been subjected to such vile reinvention, in what has to be one of the most perversely hilarious books ever written. For all the ribald humor and naughty goings-on, Santa Steps Out is actually a surprisingly cynical tale (with a final line that beautifully bastardizes Dickens) that flays alive those childhood images used to pacify us and keep us in line, and shows them to be a soporific sham."
—Brian Hodge
"What's truly disturbing: seeing these childhood symbols degenerating into monsters. By the time Mrs. Claus is exacting her revenge with the help of Santa's elves, and the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are tearing each other apart in an act of sexual congress, any comfort we may find in these figures is way out the window."
—Thomas Deja
"Santa Steps Out is breathtaking. It's almost life changing. A novel so refreshing and inspiring to read that it breaks down the walls of genres and sits comfortably outside of everything."
—Andy Fairclough
"Devereaux handles the postmodern and religious aspects of the story deftly and delicately, establishing an air of peace despite all the chaos of the plot and thematic concerns. A piece of real live literature, treated beautifully and with delicacy and great benevolent-but-black humor, and I'm just humbled at the wicked genius of Robert Devereaux."
—Mehitobel Wilson
"Beyond the apparent sensational surface of cultural iconic jockeyings for satisfaction and succor, Devereaux gradually unveils levels of mythic significance. A perfectly sincere, seriocomic exploration of myth and taboo, sexuality and relationships, and the evolution of the godhead. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Robert Devereaux."
—Edward Bryant
"Due to Devereaux's artful writing, I found myself totally emotionally engrossed in the detailed scenes of sex and violence. Oddly, there is a strong positive tone throughout the story. Love and healing are depicted in blasphemous and kinky scenes, showing that sex is intricately woven into human life and does not deserve to be isolated far away from the other parts of life. A vivid and at times disturbingly powerful link to our youth."
—Robert G. Buice, Jr.
"Even as I roared with laughter, I felt the perverseness of the guilt which tinged my enjoyment with an edge of danger, and yes, even fear...fear that I had finally transgressed beyond hope of redemption in the eyes of the God to whom all is owed, if Catholic school is to be taken seriously and literally. While this insanely raunchy, funny, thrilling, tragic, and occasionally cute and silly fable is entertainment of the highest order, it also jabs hard at convention and at the traditional—and it succeeds in momentarily and artistically turning your world topsy-turvy. Robert Devereaux, whose shining work I've lauded before, rises so far above the next level here that he is literally flirting with the kind of immortal Art label we generally reserve for the classics—and I mean the likes of Oedipus, Homer, and Euripides."
—William D. Gagliani
"Devereaux breaks every mold imaginable, and he does it with élan, and with an unabashed glee."
—Monica J. O'Rourke
Also by Robert Devereaux
Deadweight
Walking Wounded
Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes
Caliban and Other Tales
A Flight of Storks and Angels
Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice
Santa Steps Out
A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups
by
Robert Devereaux
Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups
Copyright © 1998, 2010 by Robert Devereaux. All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For Caitlin and Lianna
beloved lovebunnies
whose childhood
(as if their dad could possibly know)
must surely have been
perfectly normal
Contents
Prologue: Cupiditas Resurgens
Prologue: Cupiditas Resurgens
Part I. Betrayal
Chapter 1. Seduction in Three Acts
Chapter 2. Santa's First Lie
Chapter 3. Twenty Years of Secrecy
Part II. Discovery
Chapter 4. What the Easter Bunny Saw
Chapter 5. Mounting Frustrations
Chapter 6. Spilling the Beans
Part III. Consequences
Chapter 7. Anya Confronts Her Husband
Chapter 8. Vengeance and Lust
Chapter 9. Rachel All Grown Up
Chapter 10. Invitations Accepted
Part IV. Trying Times
Chapter 11. Modus Vivendi
Chapter 12. Blood and Passion
Chapter 13. The Tooth Fairy Takes Her Revenge
Part V. After the Storm
Chapter 14. A Time to Mourn
Chapter 15. A Time to Rejoice
Epilogue: Tooth and Claw
Epilogue: Tooth and Claw
Afterword: Making Light of Santa Claus
About the Author
Prologue: Cupiditas Resurgens
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin—it is the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
—S. J. Perelman
I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. . . . If I were a man, I would always be laughing at myself.
—Yoko Ono
Human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death or Santa Claus.
—Eric Berne
Prologue: Cupiditas Resurgens
In the beginning, the Father heard rumblings from Above and cut His vacation short.
Regained His throne.
Surveyed the scene.
Flew into a towering rage.
The archangel Michael had gone berserk, his thick white wings now twitching. As he staggered before the throne, the glowering God-mask angled upon his face. Shards of Hermes jagged out of his body. The six other archangels looked on, wringing their hands. Raphael's eyes were moist with tears.
"How long has he been like this?" God asked them. Gesturing toward Michael, He expunged all evidence of the trickster-god, putting him under as He had done during the great transformation.
"Two decades and more, Father," said Gabriel, he who had been Apollo in the old times. "We couldn't stop him. As Your surrogate, he had absolute power. He wouldn't listen to reason."
The Father lifted the God-mask from Michael's face. The penitent looked pale as moonlight.
"Dear Lord, forgive me," he begged. "One of the cherubim—that one up there—whispered a suggestion in my ear. It sounded so splendid and proper at the time. But now I see it wasn't, not in the least."
God glanced upward.
As He suspected.
He flared a finger at the impish grin and plunged Eros deep inside the plump winged babe; its face became smooth and innocent once more.
"And what was the cherub's suggestion?"
Michael told Him.
God erupted. "Omanko!" He swore. "Hijo de puta! Scheissdreck! Jaevla dritsekk! Oh, c'est vraiment con! Gott verdammi hure seich! Madonna damigiana con tutti i santi dentro e Dio per tappo!"
Now the Son, once Dionysus, spoke. "Michael," He said, "you know that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are never to cross paths. It's one of our Father's most solemn injunctions."
Michael hung his head. "It only happened once, for a moment, in Idaho, Christmas of 1969. They had the barest glimpse, then she vanished and it was over. Except that they began . . . doing things on their own."
"Christ!" God peered down in disbelief at the earth below. His all-seeing eye traced the effect of the lapsed cherub's suggestion, short range and long, watching it ramify over three-and-twenty years. "Oh Jesus, will you look at 1991, it's all three of them. They're going haywire down there!"
"Easy, Father. No need for apoplexy. I'm sure it's fixable."
And it was.
At a cost.
*****
The twenty-fourth of December, 1970.
The Tooth Fairy, wearing nothing but a necklace of huge blood-flecked teeth, squatted on the eastern shore of her island and looked out to sea. A storm was kicking up out there, a real corker.
Good, she thought, chewing over the remains of an eagle she had dropped from the heavens with a high-flung silver dollar. Whatever resentments she harbored against the being who these days called himself God, she liked the way he made his creatures: with the tastiest part, the skeleton, on the inside.
Staring seaward, she mapped out the evening's itinerary. As always, instinct told her which dwellings to visit, which bedrooms to enter, which brats to loom over, longing to rip the teeth clean out of their skulls like moist sweet kernels of corn, but confined, alas, to the meager leavings beneath their pillows.
But this night, this Christmas Eve, the Tooth Fairy had a second agenda. Centuries of God-imposed isolation had created an itch inside as deep and omnipresent as a toothache. She sorely missed the old frolics through glen and dale, the thud of randy hoofs at her heels, the goat-breath blasting hot against her shoulderblades.
She needed a lover. Someone all-giving, warm, and cheery, whose stamina went beyond that of mere mortals.
She needed Santa Claus.
In the days before God had laid a veil of forgetting over his mind, she had enjoyed him often. A thing of danger and abandon he had been then, beautiful to behold and incredible to couple with.
She pictured him as she had seen him in Boise the year before, kneeling by the tree in the Sloane residence off Cloverdale Drive, his distressingly cherubic face radiant with philanthropy. The memory made her quim throb. Before this night was out, she vowed, she would enjoy him once more.
Until then, the ocean harbored a treasure of its own, something that would do as a stopgap.
Digestion's clink and jingle sped the masticated eagle through her system. Inside her rectum, thin disks of metallic waste stacked up neat and heavy as rolled coins. There in the sand, as the wind skimmed along the shore and blasted her full in the face, she relaxed her sphincter and shat a quick clatter of quarters.
Relieved, she rose to outface the wind.
Into the restless surf she strode. The undertow ate at the seabed on which she stood. Her palms lowered to the churning surface, straightened toward the horizon, then swept about until her thumbtips touched her navel. Again and again, as sheets of rain whipped at her cheeks, she repeated the movement, chanting words of summoning.
In an instant, the waves vanished, the wind dropped, the rain relented. It fell about her in a gentle mist, pelting the calm sea with the muted sound of hundreds of herons taking flight. Long before her drowned sailor surfaced, she saw him rise from the ship, blink his lidless eyes, look down in wonder at the tattered remnants of his body. The force of her lust had drawn his manflesh up into the crude semblance of an erection. That same lust now made what was left of his limbs thrust and kick stiffly through the sea in a mockery of swimming.
Thigh-deep in water, holding sea and sky at bay, the Tooth Fairy watched his approach, skin and bones breaking the surface not fifty yards away.
Closer, he rose to a lurch. Two things about him drew her attention. The first was the ragged column of flesh at his groin, nibbled here and there by small sharp teeth but serviceable enough, she judged, for one last tumble in surf and sand.
The second was the seductive gleam of bone. The nearer he came, the more aroused she grew at hints of the stuff peeking out coquettishly from behind curtains of fle
sh: a succulent patch of skull, a long curve of rib, the lower half of one femur begging for the viselock of her jaws.
Above all, the teeth.
They grinned across his skull, a full set of them, molars, bicuspids, canines, incisors, laid out in logical array like a mapped sampler of chocolates. All hers from crown to root, from enamel to pulp.
When he was six feet away, she released storm and ocean, letting them fury about her once more. Then she grabbed him, dragged him to the beach, and straddled him, filling her hungry channel with raw dead flesh. As she rode him, she prised apart his jaws and sucked seawater from his incisors.
By the time orgasm seized her, her mouth was stuffed full of dead man's teeth. Yet even in the high delirium of gustatory and clitoral ecstasy, part of her mind leaped into the night ahead and fixed on the jolly old elf in his bright red suit, remembering the generous gifts that hung beneath that shiny black belt of his, behind the large red buttons of his fly.
She knew what she wanted for Christmas.
I. Betrayal
Give me chastity and continency—but not yet.
—Saint Augustine
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
—Oscar Wilde
A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in trouble.
—Adlai Stevenson
1. Seduction in Three Acts
With Anya's kiss tingling warm upon his cheek and her grandmotherly smile of devotion dancing in his eyes, Santa Claus bounded through cheering throngs of elves and lifted the worn leather reins of his sleigh. He loved their heft, how they took to his hands like tendons stretched from his snorting stamping team straight up through the brawn of his arms to his shoulders.
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