Sex workers are not just window dressing. That’s what Christa Faust wants people to understand as she introduces readers to her new series from AWA, Hit Me. Like her previous series, Bad Mother, Faust is not about the damsel in distress concept, and she is more than capable of turning expectations upside down when it comes to her female characters. In Hit Me, we meet Lulu, a sex worker who can take the pain.
“A high-octane crime thriller from Christa Faust (Bad Mother, Redemption) and Priscilla Petraites (Chariot). Lulu has a very unique profession: She gets paid by the bruise. When she is witness to the execution of one of her regular clients, she escapes into the night with a briefcase filled with diamonds and a pack of killers on her trail. Navigating the dark underbelly of decaying, early-90’s Atlantic City, one step ahead of her pursuers, Lulu must call upon every one of her street-born instincts and underworld connections in what will be the longest – and possibly last – night of her life.”
“It’s always been important to me to center the voices of marginalized women in my work,” says Faust. “Professional ‘subs’ – that is to say, women who get paid to be on the receiving end of BDSM kink sessions — are doubly marginalized within the already marginalized group of sex workers. Everyone loves a Dominatrix, because it’s a fun escapist fantasy to imagine tying and beating powerful men. It gets more complicated when a woman gets paid to be tied and beaten. Even more so when she is a hardcore masochist who loves pain and also enjoys those same activities in her private life.”
Hit Me explores a more brutal side of sex work and the boundaries Lulu has in place to protect herself and earn a living. As a professional Dominatrix and a lifestyle pervert, Faust has sessioned with, filmed with, and had intimate relationships with women just like Lulu.” Without exception, she says, women like Lulu are some of the strongest women she knows, yet when we see them portrayed on film or in fiction, “they are almost always seen as pathetic victims without agency who need to be rescued. A man who can endure a lot of pain is seen as a cool action hero. Why not a woman?”
And a woman can come to the rescue, as Lulu does when her bodyguard Danny finds himself in big trouble. As her bodyguard, it’s his job to watch out for her during her private sessions, “which can be far more dangerous for subs than for Dommes like me,” notes Faust. When we meet Danny at the beginning of the series, Lulu is quite clear about their relationship: Danny is in love with her. The feeling is not mutual, but that doesn’t mean she won’t do what it takes to protect the people in her life that she cares about. “We don’t so much go into the history of their partnership as much as we watch them move forward while navigating their conflicted emotions in this bullet-dodging, will-they-or-won’t-they dance.”
The story is set in ’90s Atlantic City, New Jersey, which, as a native New Yorker, Faust describes as “our shady, dimestore Vegas.” Gambling plays a big part in Hit Me, and the “seediness and corruption and faded glamor” that Faust loves about Atlantic City makes it a natural fit for this story. Keeping it personal in that ‘write what you know’ kind of way, the ’90s timeline is when Faust herself was most active in the kink scene.
Faust is joined by artist Priscilla Petraites, who said “Yes” to Lulu’s high-stakes mess even before reading the plot when AWA asked if she’d be interested in working with the writer. “After taking knowledge of what the series was about,” says Petraites, “I was just excited to start drawing it. That’s all I like to draw: beauty and gore, sex and violence.”
“Christa is writing about a world she knows very well so I’m glad for all the information she can give me. Her scripts are very well written so after reading it just place myself into the character’s skin, feel it, walk through the scenes and build it all like it was a movie in my head.”
You can get a feel for what to expect in this five-part story when it comes out in March by swinging by Faust’s Twitter feed, which comes complete with pulp, sleaze, and everything in between, including Mads Mikkelson in bondage. Although Mads, sadly, does not make an appearance in this book, bondage certainly does. Following a recent dive into procrastination, Faust says, “I watched more footage of Mads than any sane human should ever have to endure. You could say that it factors into Hit Me in so far as I wanted to flip the script and tell a story in which the woman is the hero and the “damsel in distress” is a man. Who incidentally gets tied up a lot.”
“Because, bondage.”
