By CHARLIE AVERY HARRIS (Holloway House; 1979)

This Holloway House paperback was allegedly withdrawn from publication for having “too much sex.”  I’ll have to question that claim, as WHOREDAUGHTER went through multiple printings in its day (with at least three different covers), and its sexual content is plentiful but hardly without precedent, especially for a book published by Holloway House (which began as a smut outfit and never entirely abandoned that orientation).  The novel is, however, pretty outrageous, with its copious acts of lovingly described violence ultimately outpacing the carnality.

Charlie Avery Harris was a protégé of the late Donald Goines, one of Holloway’s star authors.  The title WHOREDAUGHTER was a direct lift from Goines’ WHORESON (1972), while the story has undeniable echoes of the maestro’s BLACK GIRL LOST (1973).  The major difference between the two writers is that Goines turned out books that were rough and unsparing but also sensitive and emphatic; those first two adjectives are very much a part of the book under discussion, while the second two are nowhere to be found.

That the reader is in for a rough ride is forecast by the opening chapter.  Set in a Baltimore ghetto, it features Paul Silverman, a white physician with a pregnancy fetish, canoodling with Rose, a black prostitute who’s nine months pregnant (although she falsely informs him she’s only five months gone)—but then, during a bout of oral sex, her water breaks (in Paul’s mouth!) and a baby pops out.  That baby, a white-skinned girl, is christened Whoredaughter.

From there we’re thrust into an impoverished universe in which everyone is perverted and amoral, with Whoredaughter being the absolute worst of the lot.  As she grows into adolescence Whoredaughter becomes determined to live up to her name, and despite the fact that she suffers from a “Racial Gap” (meaning she’s apparently too white to be black yet too black in orientation to pass for Caucasian), fulfils that destiny with the help of Junius, a “Macking Gangster” (and the headliner of Charlie Avery Harris’ 1976 novel of that title, as well as 1977’s BROAD PLAYERS) who becomes Whoredaughter’s sort-of pimp.  Yet her evil nature, which leads to the complete destruction of a pervy schoolteacher and a virginal ex con, ultimately does her in.

Harris’ descriptions are rendered in a highly unrefined, politically incorrect vernacular (“She excused herself to go to the restroom to pee, while he marveled at the fleshy display of her lovely ass”), yet possessed of a street-level realism that helps ground all the outrage.  Harris is partial to narrative diversions detailing the world surrounding Whoredaughter and her fellows, a world populated by soulless whores, sadistic pimps, ruthless drug dealers, crooked cops, junkies who intently spy on a mailman as he delivers welfare checks, an Italian hitman who experiences an orgasm every time he kills and other assorted depravities.

You might deem this book trashy exploitation, and you’d be right, but there’s truth in its excess.  I’d like to be able to dismiss WHOREDAUGHTER as a work of morbid imagination with no basis in reality, but unfortunately I know better.