Breath Control

by Gary S. Kadet

Bob Plumose is a life coach whose own life is out of control. After teaching his clients all day about how to solve their short-term crises, Bob comes home to one he can't fix: a shoplifting daughter, a hip hop thug son, and Jo, a wife who thinks of him as added income and not much else. One day Jo lays it on the line that Bob isn't pulling his weight anymore. She demands that he attend a seminar at The Arena, an EST-clone for losers who crave empowerment. A female instructor invites Bob to a special after-party "for the elite." Feeling a strong sexual vibe, Bob stumbles into an enticement with Charisma Curry, an artist/seductress who quickly takes him to bed. But he doesn't have sex as he knows it. What Charisma does literally takes his breath away - she introduces Bob to "Breath Play," a game of denying oxygen for sexual pleasure. Frightened, guilty, but almost immediately addicted to this game, Bob suddenly has a secret life in a secret world of other players. It's not depravity that obsesses him but the discovery of being suspended between worlds, truth and lies, life and death. Bob's secret turns sinister when members of the elite of The Arena start dying off. Bob tries to blow the whistle, but the police won't listen. Bob has no one to turn to and nowhere to go - a dangerous predicament once he discovers that he's about to be the next casualty.

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 31, 2023

About the author

Gary S. Kadet was a journalist for 15 years working the crime, arts and general assignments beats for such newspapers as the Boston Herald, Globe and the Quincy Patriot Ledger. He was the Crime Editor for the nationally read Boston Book Review and wrote for Playboy Magazine, which published his fiction. He also ran the world's tenth-largest adult website and was a trailblazer in the early years of the Internet. He's the author of the literary thriller/romance novel "D/s - an Anti-Love Story" with Tor/Forge/Macmillan which was a main selection of the Doubleday book-of-the-month-club. The work broke new ground in detailing the seamy side of real-world (non-fantasy) BDSM, much to the chagrin of its self-appointed "community," who felt threatened by this work of fiction (in the same way bogus preachers felt about Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry"). Not shying away from controversy, his newest work is the literary novel "The Ogre Life," which on the surface is about the world of bodybuilding and all its attendant sexual fetishism, sleaze and drug use, but which actually questions the meaning of reality itself.

Reviews

[Doug B]

I read Gary Kadet’s D/S: An Anti-Love Story, and almost wished I hadn’t. Well, not really but the damn thing sent me on a mission to read all the stuff this man wrote. That led me to Breath Control, a book Michael Kelland John Hutchence perhaps penned from the grave, using Kadet as a telepathic keyboard.

Yes, the book is about how partial suffocation makes sex a gas. If those kicks were good enough for David Carradine, there were damn well good enough for Bob Plumose, our otherwise normally aspirating protagonist. Bob is sufficiently expert at the depravation game (hint, don’t try to partially hang yourself unattended) to see the errors of his Hypoxic ways. Is this enlightenment in time to save his skin? I’d have to be an a-hole to spill those beans. Okay, I am an asshole, but not a total dick.