"The Story of the Eye" is a surprisingly well-written pornographic novella about the sexual awakening of three French teenagers and the extremes to which they go to explore and fulfill their fantasies. The central theme of the book is desire: how desire often manifests itself in eccentric and perverse ways, how desire for certain objects or acts have associational roots in childhood experiences that we cannot now recall and therefore remain unconscious, how desire is frequently repressed by society with sometimes tragic consequences. The book, as many here have noted, is at times shocking, but I would say a fairer characterization of it is as colorful and daring. Read it expecting to be startled or even upset by some of the events that take place, and it probably won't have any more harmful effect on you than, say, a Surrealist film by Salvador Dali such as "Un Chien Andalou" or a graphic sexual painting by Marcel Duchamps. Furthermore, the closing section of the book goes a long way toward putting the events that have been recounted in context and "bringing you down" back to reality after the horrifying, though highly stylized and symbolic, scene in the next-to-last chapter. Take the book with a grain of salt, and then dive in and try to enjoy it.