Summer in the Garden of Eros celebrates that delightful memory in many a man's life, a youthful fling with a slightly older woman. We're talking about young people who are all in their twenties, so the author originally published this story as Spring & his Summers, with his younger self as May or Spring, and his slightly older seductresses as June or Summer. When the sensuous god Eros demanded that his name be included (truth in packaging), the title became as you see it. Hormonius Young was a handsome, strong, but lost (or 'not yet found') young artist with long hair, a beard, and a guitar. For some reason, his life was continually graced by an irresistible attraction to Spring-Summer or May-June romances. He and his women lovers were all in their twenties, the oldest just thirty. His women were slightly older and more experienced. Many were jaded and hurt by divorce and social straight-jackets of former unhappy marriages. For a young man, a relationship like this is a learning adventure full of wonder, an initiation into mature emotions and sexual delights with a woman of experience. For a women newly divorced or widowed, dealing with her pain and anger and other issues, a dalliance with her young lover is a brief interlude of the greatest freedom she will ever experience. Think about it: she is between marriages. She keeps her lover secret from family and friends. There are no obligation or future, just the pleasures of here and now. The woman owns and operates the show, so the garden of secrets and delights is hers to share as she sees fit. It is her garden of dreams and games, into which she allows a suitable and well-appointed young lover who is gentle, kind, understanding, energetic, and a stallion. This is that moment in old movies, where they couldn't show anything, where the violins turn into a gale wind under ripping gray clouds in the (dark and stormy) night, and wild horses are released from their barn to run free in the alfalfa fields whinnying with exuberant desire. Like the young Spring, a beautiful young Summer will forever remember the wildest fling of her young life, and her moment of total freedom when the sun never stood higher, rounder, yellower, warmer, or happier in her own secret Garden of Eros. Together, the young man and each of his women in succession found unforgettable passion in the secret garden of her heart--and among the pillows. It was, at the time, forbidden fruit--a love out of season, especially ripe and full in the summery Garden of Eros, and never to forget. Let's put it this way. Hormonius Young was a boy, by most standards, even with a beard and the lustful appetites of a brewery horse. His women were not cougars, but kittens (with claws, and teeth as sharp as their appetites and shameless laughter). Hormonius Young wrote these erotic memoirs much later in life, when the haze of memory and the brandy of time had painted new layers of delight and understanding into what had once been, for him in his spring and the hers in their blissfully perfect young summers, the raw energy of youth and the dawning of experience. Summer in the Garden of Eros stands freshly and delightfully on its own as a character-driven, sensual novel, with nods to many predecessors in erotic candor, including D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover) and Anaïs Nin (Delta of Venus) as well as the 'wild Dionysian yelps' of John Updike (Couples). Summer in the Garden of Eros celebrates male-female (mf) love, specifically that of the lusty young man and slightly older, lustier young woman, with an occasional tidbit of ff to add spice. It is tamer, and for more universal tastes, and therefore for many readers more engaging and filled with humor and sunshine, than darker-themed modern oeuvres like Pauline Reagé's The Story of O or E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey.
About the Author: Hormonius Young was a handsome but lost (or 'not yet found') young artist with long hair and a guitar--and an irresistible attraction to spring-summer or May-June romances. His women were slightly older and more experienced--some jaded and hurt by divorce and the straight-jackets of former sad marriages, all now exuberant and on the prowl for a nice May lover like the young stallion Hormonius. Together, they found unforgettable passion in the secret garden of her heart. The author's reflections are insightful, at times funny, usually sexually charged; they are always respectful and loving toward the women with whom he shared wonderful moments, who ultimately were his truest and most intimate friends.