They (the French, mostly) say that the psychic forces that drive us to the grave are the same ones that drive us in the bedroom. Sex, good or bad, is obliteration, sublimation, rapture—a temporary way off this mortal coil, a preview of the freeing nothingness right around the corner. What happens before death: one’s life flashes before their eyes. What happens before orgasm: …something like that.
But people are more isolated than ever—certainly having less sex than ever before—splintered off from one another through alternate dark urges. Careerism, narcissism, individualism, and the looming threat of rape hanging over culture at large have driven us to seek our own private oblivions. It hardly seems worth the risk to trust each other with the crucial task of letting us disappear from our lives for a while.
Though plenty of lit for young women of an edgier persuasion takes place somewhere between sex and death, Houston writer and poet Jan Saenz is interested in the exact, gooey threshold between them for her debut novel 200 Monas. In a tightrope act between high-concept smut and feminist critique, Saenz makes a case for messy connection, even if it’s far more likely to kill you than going it alone.
Saenz doesn’t waste a moment on preamble, immediately placing a hefty bag of mysterious pressed pills into the hands of her Arvy Keening– a high-strung millennial-coded neurotic still processing the recent death of her eccentric mother, to whom the pills belonged. Arvy knows her mother dealt drugs, but in a divine feminine healer sort of way: doses of shrooms to pair with the crystal dildos she furnished her friends with.
But the pills turn out to be something else entirely. Accosted by her mother’s suppliers—a grotesque duo composed of a sadist in a filthy Taylor Swift tee and his hulking, mute girlfriend—she’s told she’s come into possession of monas. A cousin of MDMA, monas make you cum in a way that defies both language and the basic fabric of reality.
Arvy’s more than happy to fork them over, but that won’t do: she’s given two days to sell every last one, or she’ll be hunted down and killed. In a twist of fate, Arvy meets Wolf: a drop-dead gorgeous drug dealer who is suspiciously willing to help her move the product.
The drugs turn out to be a lesser fixation for Saenz’s main characters, who spend most of the novel flat-out propositioning each other, grazing erogenous zones, and slipping fingers every which where. For all the drugs and cosmic orgasms along the way, the real drama is in the way Wolf and Arvy circle one another, wanting and unwanting, spinning webs of jealousy and desire.
But the drugs are, of course, a factor. All manner of characters pop a mona and feel the pain/pleasure: Arvy doubles over during a Gender Studies final to dry hump another student’s backpack to shrieking completion; an aging lesbian couple beat each other senseless, then immediately screw each other’s brains out; and then Wolf.
Wolf, a compassionate and sensually attuned 25-year-old, a seemingly faultless obsession for Arvy from his first introduction—says that what he experienced on mona is too dangerous for men. Though he stows himself away in a broom closet for the duration of his high, he refuses to help sell it to other guys, who might not have the same restraint.
Gesturing to some inherent risk of male violence is not for Arvy, but the reader: in his sexy, enticing, mysterious aloofness, we have to trust that Wolf the drug dealer is a good guy. Without the mystery, he’s just some loser. But with it, potentially, he’s someone who couldn’t control himself if the circumstances were right. Troublingly for many, this is kind of hot.
Saenz’s awareness of this dynamic is what makes the sex in 200 Monas such a freaky success. It’s perverted, eager, borderline Freudian and fluid-slick, anchored by its heated central relationship teased out to its breaking point. Saenz transcends the typical provocations of spicy-pepper-emoji BookTok romance, opting for tense, nasty and perfectly overimaginative prose designed to actually test one’s sensibilities. Nearly every sex scene is complicated by grief, fear, and dread—and miraculously, it makes each sexier. The less we’re able to grab onto Wolf’s psychology, the better. He’s a weaver of fantasies for Arvy—and his dreamworld is all the tastier because within it, there’s no pain.
Frustratingly, these blistering passages stand in stark contrast to much of the story we’re originally promised, which is too often mired in wooden teen sex comedy dialogue. For every filthy image we’re treated to, we’re soon yanked out by one of Arvy’s overwrought euphemisms. She (among other characters) speaks in punchlines, implausible and delivered with a self-satisfied wink. As tension approaches its peak, Arvy drops a term like “lady boner,” or likens her vulva to a glazed donut. I found this strain of humor to be 200 Monas’ biggest stumbling block.
An ongoing subplot featuring a female celibacy cult is its second weakness, though it carries the novel’s thematic weight on its back far more than the pills do. Wolf’s mother, a shaman fostering female empowerment and independence with a commune of abstinent college girls, is Saenz’s avatar of loneliness. Though she’s sexual—sometimes disturbingly so—she’s ultimately in the business of isolation, forcing her young proteges out of love and sex and into what she deems greater: high-powered jobs, impenetrable comfort in one’s own skin, transcendence beyond the need for male companionship. Wolf’s mother is the first interested buyer for the mona. She envisions an initiation ritual for new girls who might need some convincing on celibacy.
If that sounds convoluted, it is—but it’s the novel’s most concrete statement on intimacy in a time when fantasy is so readily fulfilled outside of one another. For Arvy, the hierarchy of sex appeal is laid out clearly. First, what could happen between her and her fantasy man. Then, the guaranteed sexual rush of monas. And in a firm last place: what will most likely transpire once they fuck—the inevitability of disappointment, miscommunication, awkwardness, maybe a just-fine orgasm, the clarity to recall the pain of her reality.
But Saenz ultimately lands in favor of that inevitable disappointment, that sticky trudge uphill together in the hope that you might reach the heights of mona, maybe even rise past it. Sure, getting off is great. But when the forces of love and lust finally bring Arvy and Wolf together, it’s a supernova no lab could create. It’s really the only way—the only real thing—even if it kills you.
FICTION
200 Monas
By Jan Saenz
Little Brown and Company
Published March 3, 2026
