The Outcasts

by March Hastings

An explosive novel that exposes the magnetic pull of forbidden lust...when a wife takes a mistress. Two couples join for a weekend of escape from New York...a getaway that becomes a cauldron of boiling temptations that would ignite their long-buried desires and shatter their lives. It's the story of Leigh Whitman, a rich, married woman who has everything a woman could desire...and yet aches to indulge her repressed, compulsive desires, aroused now by Jennie Dunbar...a emotionally-torn woman trapped in a decomposing marriage and who now finds herself yearning for a different kind of touch, a different kind of love... ABOUT THE AUTHOR “March Hastings" was one of the pseudonyms (along with Laura Duchamp, Viveca Ives, and Alden Stowe) of Sally M. Singer, a lesbian writer born in 1930s and the author of more than 130 novels, across many genres, in her lifetime. She is undoubtedly best-known for her string of ground-breaking, lesbian-themed, sexy pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Three Women, The Third Theme, Veil of Torment, and The Demands of the Flesh . She wrote many other sexy novels as Hastings, not all of them with a lesbian theme. However, by the late-60s/early 70s, the “March Hastings” pseudonym was co-opted by her publisher and became a house name for many different authors penning lurid paperbacks, diluting and confusing her early legacy as an influential author of lesbian pulp and straight erotic fiction.

189 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1961

About the author

Writing in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, March Hastings, a pseudonym of Sally Singer, was one of the most prolific authors of the lesbian pulp era. She now lives in Florida.

Reviews

[Nik Maack · Rating 4 out of 5]

March Hastings can write. But she does write the same book over and over again. Jennie and Brian have a rocky marriage. Leigh and Dirk are rich. Are they going to help Brian, a struggling artist who needs a break? And what about Jake, Brian's best friend? Can he be trusted? Of course not.

Jennie is our hero and she sleeps with every single other character in the book. Being a dated old timey bit of erotica, the sex is about ascending into the stars and becoming one with the moment and so on. The word penis is evil and goes unsaid.

The plot is weird. The characters are interesting. The sexism and mysoginy are over the top. Brian hits Jennie, and that doesn't seem to mean much. She loves him but hates him but wants him back but is going to leave him but won't leave him. She's all over the place.

Fun, tortured, silly book rife withe hilarity and oddity. It's campy old time.erotica. It ain't literature, but you'll be entertained. Maybe.