The novels describe explicit sexual adventures of the female protagonist Beauty and the male characters Alexi, Tristan, and Laurent, featuring both maledom and femdom scenarios amid vivid imageries of bisexuality, homosexuality, ephebophilia, and pony play.

[3] After the success of Interview with the Vampire (1976), Anne Rice wrote two extensively researched historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982).

Neither of them gave her the critical acclaim or the commercial success of her first novel; the main complaints about The Feast of All Saints were that it was too heavy and dense to read easily,[4] and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated.

[5] She had been thinking about a story set during the time of Oscar Wilde for the next novel, but decided to abandon it and go back to the erotic writing she had explored in the 1960s.

[9] In the first chapter of the story, Beauty is awakened from her hundred-year sleep by the Prince, not with a kiss, but through copulation, initiating her into a Satyricon-like world of sexual adventures.

The moral of Alexi's story notwithstanding, Beauty willfully disobeys, and the book closes with her being sentenced to brutal slavery in the neighboring village while her master weeps.

While being imprisoned in a cage, Laurent contemplates the recent punishments he received as a runaway on a wooden cross, recalling its pain, degradation and undeniable pleasure.

During the last leg of the voyage, the Captain tells Beauty that she is to be released from her servitude because of her parents' demands and, to her great dismay, sent back home to get married: she hysterically protests, but to no avail.

Back at the castle, the Queen takes Lexius as her slave and sends him to the merciless kitchen servants who trained Prince Alexi earlier in the first book.

The book ends as Laurent marries Beauty, saying that they shall live happily ever after, or perhaps "a good deal happier" than anyone else could ever guess— thus hinting that they will continue the pleasure of dominance and submission with each other.

The fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty has been analyzed by folklorists and other scholars of various types, and many of them have noticed prominent erotic elements of the story.

[10] The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim commented that the tale "abounds with Freudian symbolism"[11] and that the princes who try to reach Sleeping Beauty before the appropriate time only to perish in the thorns surrounding her castle serves as a warning that premature sexual encounters are destructive.

[13] Another foremost difference in Rice's rewriting is that the story takes Beauty to a series of far harsher trials after her period of extreme passivity in a coma-like sleep.

[14] In the beginning of the first book, the Prince takes Beauty with her parents' consent, having persuaded them that, after completing the sexual servitude in his castle, the slaves emerge with "wisdom, patience, and self-discipline", as well as a full acceptance of their innermost desires and an understanding of the suffering of humankind.

[18] Professor Linda Badley of Middle Tennessee State University wrote in her 1996 book Writing Horror and the Body on the trilogy, that rewriting the myth of Sleeping Beauty as sadomasochistic fantasies enabled Anne Rice to explore "liminal areas of experience that could not be articulated in conventional literature, extant pornography, or politically correct discourse".