Imagine you’re suddenly swapped into the body of the opposite sex. Now, imagine it happens during oral sex. Awkward! This is how OF SOUND MIND AND SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY by William Quincy Belle opens, and it’s a jaw-dropping (no pun intended) introduction to this quirky science fiction sex novel, which owes more to “Porky’s,” “American Pie,” and a slew of Hollywood sex comedies than it does to the literary works of Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein. Alan is a prudish, big city executive and Hana a liberal hooker with a heart of gold. They volunteer as test subjects at a college lab and wind up with their minds transferred into each other’s body. This 48-hour body swap allows Alan and Hana to explore the fundamental nature of sex, relationships, and romance.
There are plenty of situational gender gags here. (Hana gets her scrotum stuck in a zipper, while Alan struggles to walk in heels and longs for the convenience of a urinal.) But when one character turns to another and exclaims, “Come on! That’s funny!” it usually isn’t. The humor in the book goes far enough to be raunchy, but not far enough to be funny. At its best, the story looks at the war of the sexes, the commonality of men and women, and what it takes to make a modern relationship survive. At its worst, it re-enforces the stereotypes it rallies against. Making the female the sexual aggressor may seem like a twist on a trope, but sticking her in a man’s body undoes the effect. If Alan really wants to know what it’s like to feel like a woman, Hana should get him pregnant and leave him or force him to work for less pay than his counterparts, while suffering from debilitating menstrual cramps and watch him fade to near invisibility post-menopause. But Belle chooses not to dig too deep, and, as a result, OF SOUND MIND AND SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY feels like a drunken one night stand — kinda fun, but not something you’d repeat.
William Quincy Belle’s OF SOUND MIND AND SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY is an amusing, if unconventional, sex comedy–hiding out in a science fiction novel and punctuated with situational gags and dirty jokes.
~Rob Errera for IndieReader