Congrats to our friend - author and fellow NYC history buff Mykola Dementiuk who has just had another book published by Synergy Press.

Award winning adult fantasy and subjects author Mykola (Mick) Dementiuk returns this month with his latest publication from Synergy Press, 100 Whores: Memories of a John, a collection of short stories detailing the sordid and sleazy underworld of street-hookers and the customers (the "johns") who patronized them in 1960's and 70's era Manhattan.

It was a place and time when sex and kinks of any kind of description or variety were available for those who were willing to pay the going rate, much like today. But times were bit different then. If you had $10 or $20 for the girl and another few dollars to get a room, just about what ever your horned-up mind could think of could be yours. But sometimes, you might get much more than you bargained for. Or maybe less. Or maybe just ripped off.

And there were just so many of these girls working the streets! All day he'd see them passing by, looking for the guys, some like himself, who were single and out looking for a good time, others who were looking to live out fantasies their wives or girlfriends might not indulge them in. God, the women! Young ones, some who were WAY too young, some who'd been on the streets only for a few days. Older, experienced women who'd been at it a bit too long maybe. Beautiful girls, ugly girls. A lot of girls who were, upon closer inspection, not really girls at all. Boozer chicks and doped-out junkie girls. And most of them would do whatever you wanted if you just had the money. There wasn't a lot of love for most of these girls, who by the time they hit the streets had become a nameless, almost faceless parade of mostly-affordable and easily attainable jizz receptacles.

Mick was young, (usually) had a job, and he had the money. Or he'd get it and come back. For the first 123 pages, he details, in short 1 - 2 page stories, the "100 Whores," each story a memory of an encounter with one of the working girls of 60's/70's Manhattan. Times Square was an obvious area where you might go to find whores in those days, but there was another area, further south, down on 3rd and 4th Avenues near 13th Street and the surrounding areas that the majority of these stories of Mick's adventures take place in. It was an area where old, cheap, run-down motels were abundant in those pre-gentrification days. The guy running the front desk sure didn't give a fuck what you were getting up to...and he wasn't stupid, either.

There are also tales of kinky, anonymous sexual encounters that take place in the now hard to imagine adult XXX theatres that used to be so prevalent in New York in those "sexual revolution" days. The pimps and other various shady characters of questionable stability and mentality were always nearby, threatening and disturbing much of the time.

As Mick states in the introduction to the book, "I was there when the whores were everywhere - the pimps, the johns, the winos, the alcoholics, the drug addicts - until you get a headache just thinking about it. Well the headaches are gone, the area is a much different place, but I still miss those days and events, no matter how crazy or dangerous they were..."

The second half of the book is given over to six short stories, with titles including "The Dildo", "The Trouble With Girls", "Cry, Baby", "Girlfriends", "The Girl On The Cardboard", and "Christmas Whore", each detailing stories of a similar vein to those found in the "100 Whores" section of the book. A woman teasing men in adult bookstores, she-pimps enslaving and selling the services of T.V. boys in 42nd Street prorno theatres, brutal butch lesbians selling the services of beaten and bruised submissive girls who will fuck you on a piece of dirty cardboard in plain view of everyone in the park for just a few dollars. A pair of young girls who find themselves in a twisted sexual encounter involving strangers in a dirty bathroom in another squalid porno theatre - a scene described in so much detail that you can almost smell the piss and amyl nitrate poppers.

All these scenarios and more like them play out in the second half of the book. Definitely not reading for those with a "vanilla" sexual view of the world. "100 Whores" will be most enjoyed by those who are a bit more adventurous, have a bit more of an open mind and are curious concerning adult behaviours and activities that were so commonplace in the very different, now legendary time and place that was the sex-for-sale world of anything goes free-for-all in 1960's and 70's era New York City.

I approached this with a bit of trepidation, knowing that Dementiuk’s writing can be unflinching, his subject matter tending toward the underside of human life that no one likes to talk about. No one would ever accuse him of soft-coating anything. The prose here is brutally honest and lean. Descriptions are visual and economic. Demetiuk does not waste his words and his style evokes Hemingway in some passages. Some of these vignettes made me cringe, some made my jaw drop, yet others had me laughing rather uncomfortably. Still, I had to keep reading. There is almost a compulsive spell that is cast on the first page and I found myself along for the entire strange, uneasy, yet thoroughly engaging ride.

100 Whores is part memoir, part anthology and wholly in-your-face. It features one hundred vignettes covering one man’s sexual adventures in New York’s East Village during the 1960’s and 70’s. These little tales document his search for pleasure and the multitude of characters he meets on this quest.

Whores also contains five original short stories about strange, opportunistic sexual encounters. In The Dildo, we delve into the mind of a young hooker plying her trade as she baits an older man, then leads him into a sex shop. The Trouble with Girls features a man in an encounter with two transvestites. Cry Baby is kind of a Serlingesque tale about a guy who gets involved in a weird sex game when he’s approached by a woman claiming to need “help” from a boyfriend who’s stalking her. In Girlfriends, two teens sneak into a porn theater and have an unexpected sexual encounter with a man who has peculiar fetishes. The Girl on the Cardboard is dark short that tells of a man who encounters two lesbians in the park, in which one partner pimps out the other.

In the novella, The Christmas Whore, a man fights with his girlfriend and finds himself back on the streets very early on Christmas morning. At a twenty-four café he encounters a woman named Sunny. After a quick fling in a cheap hotel, he takes her back to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend. When she comes home and walks in on the two of them, it’s an O’Henry-like ending that is unbelievably twisted.

This is definitely not for readers who prefer their love and sex with happily ever afters or even warm cozy houses and apartments. Many would be turned off by the title alone. However, if you are interested in catching a glimpse of the seedy side of people, to walk in a world that hardly ever sees the light of day, then I urge you read 100 Whores. It is a powerful and unforgettable reading experience.