Joseph Olshan

James was aware that his bisexuality posed an emotional threat to both the men and women in his life. However, once he met Diana he sensed that he would be looking no further than the intimacy they shared; for theirs is a consummate love story -- troubled and tender, doomed, but somehow enduring.
Of more immediate concern to Diana was the link between violence and passion in her own relationship with James -- the increasing aggression that brought the couple escalating pleasure.

Excerpt:
"At night, he tells her, he dreams of the paintings. He dreams that he is a supplicant pilgrim in The Madonna of Loretto; that he is Abraham turning an ear to the angel in The Sacrifice of Isaac; that he is Nicodemus embracing Christ's legs as the dead prophet is being carried to The Entombment; that he is St. John the Beloved kneeling before supine Mary in The Death of the Virgin. The dreams are so crystalline and he awakes from them with details that are nearly impossible to see in the reproduction plates, but which Diana is always able to find described in accompanying texts. What phenomenon of the unconscious is this? she wonders. Especially since these waking moments are the only perceptions of his that have retained any lucidity."

"Incest, abandon, emotional turbulence, and terror are the highly charged elements which create Joseph Olshan's powerful new novel, one of the very few contemporary works to give equal narrative weight to both heterosexual and homosexual activities and to invest each with convincing erotic import."
London Sunday Times