My cowriter, Racheline Maltese, has a lot of first-hand experience in and around the BDSM community. I, on the other hand, have exactly zero. Which meant that, while we were writing Room 1024, she spent a lot of time sending me links and telling me stories, and I spent a lot of time sending her emails that often just ended with “Helllllllp?”

Our wildly disparate levels of familiarity with BDSM isn’t the only reason Room 1024 is a good story for people who are new to BDSM, but it’s one of them. Yes, it’s a story that has a lot of trappings of the BDSM community — collars and flogger, yes — but those are really just the details.

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