What happens when a social misfit raised by dogmatic Catholic parents discovers that she’s 1) bisexual and 2) drawn to the occult and violent, ritualistic sex? For the narrator of Sera Maddox Drake’s ANCILLA, the answer is total immersion in a world she was brought up to fear and despise.

ANCILLA sketches the development of an unnamed character (she’s later referred to as Ancilla, from the Latin for female servant or slave) from childhood to her mid-twenties. Maddox Drake’s introduction warns readers that the book they’re about to read contains a lot of explicit sex, some of which they may find unnerving.

It’s not a bluff. The sex scenes in ANCILLA are as numerous as they are detailed. They begin with the narrator’s first sexual experiences as a teenager and gradually progress to depictions of extreme BDSM practices. There’s a prolonged scene involving needles and scalpels, another sees her brutally whipped—all of which is consensual (part of the master-apprentice relationship the narrator initiated with a librarian she met by chance at a book store).

The evolution of their relationship serves as ANCILLA’s plot, if it can be called a plot. For many (if not most) of the book’s 300-plus pages, the narrator is alone with her “master” in his apartment. When he’s not teaching her to submit to increasingly aberrant sex acts, he’s assigning her homework or holding forth on this or that occult-related subject.

ANCILLA is interspersed—at least for a while—by italicized segments that provide flashbacks into the narrator’s past. Some of them are lyrical and evocative. The book could do with more of these sections, as they offer a welcome break from the monotony of the story arc (mostly sex and esoteric meditations). They also help round out the protagonist’s character. Unfortunately, they’re few and far between, and midway through the novel they all but disappear.

It’s at this point that ANCILLA begins to feel like a bit of a slog. That’s in spite of Maddox Drake’s fluid prose style, which produces sentences like this: “Branches sway back and forth. Wind and rain kiss me sharply. Grey sky leans on me like a lover. I breathe clouds and stare into a half-dark murk. I imagine myself dissolving into the mist and rain.” In addition to the relentless barrage of sex scenes, which inevitably desensitize the reader, there are long, static passages (e.g., descriptions of her telemarketing job, cooking experiments, and university search) that prevent any kind of narrative momentum from developing. At times, the pacing is oppressively slow.

There is also a dearth of characters and settings, which makes for a stifled and slightly claustrophobic atmosphere. It’s not until the very end, when the narrator goes away to college on her own, that the novel’s horizons broaden and the reader feels engaged again.

All of that being said, the relationship portrayed in ANCILLA is convincing. And it should be noted that the descriptions of sex do not, by modern standards, constitute pornography. Maddox Drake took care to keep them within the realm of erotica.

Sera Maddox Drake’s ANCILLA, despite its flaws, is sure to appeal to a subset of readers, namely those with a more-than-casual interest in BDSM and other aspects of the occult. For the majority of people, though, the profusion of sex and mysticism is likely to prove isolating, maybe even exasperating.

~Michael Howard for IndieReader