15. A book you’ve seen adapted: Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem by Adam Mars-Jones

List Progress: 5/30

Anyone who has seen the 2025 film Pillion, which explores a toxic and unhealthy BDSM relationship between two men, might be surprised to hear it described as clean and tidy. But compared to its source material, the 2020 novella Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, Pillion follows a somewhat standard film structure. It softens some of the sharp edges and oddities of the book, making it as palatable as a story with its subject matter can be to a mass audience. But there is something deeply compelling about how odd Box Hill is.

Both Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem and Pillion follow a younger submissive gay man, Colin, who feels aimless in his life. Colin has a chance encounter with the handsome and stoic biker Ray and falls immediately into an unnegotiated kink relationship with him, despite not knowing the most basic details of Ray’s life such as what he does for work. In the novella, Colin doesn’t even know Ray’s surname. But three major differences set apart the works: the first is the 1970’s setting of the novella compared to the contemporary movie. By the 2020’s, the BDSM and kink world has much more formalized structure and arrangements for a power exchange relationship like the one that Ray and Colin are in, even if they are not going about those structures in a healthy or responsible way. The second is Colin’s age. Ray is older in both versions, but Colin is in his thirties in Pillion, while in Box Hill, the two meet on Colin’s eighteenth birthday and are together for six years until he is twenty four. This leads directly into the third difference: Box Hill is told from Colin’s perspective when he is in his forties, looking back at the relationship that defined his whole adult life. Ray was his first everything and defined how Colin navigated the world at a pivotal moment in his development into his own adult, and older Colin has to make peace with how much of that was a positive or a negative thing. Ray was undoubtedly taking advantage of Colin, but he was also responding to wants and desires that Colin clearly had. It’s unfathomable that Colin stayed in that unhealthy relationship for six whole years, but he doesn’t see himself as a victim or a prisoner. He was a young man in love and willing to accept any- and everything to keep that love.

Neither Box Hill nor Pillion are going to be for everyone; there is a lot of comfort with explicit sex, murky consent dynamics and unhealthy relationships required to get into either. But Pillion excels at being a relationship study of the dynamic between these two men, and Box Hill excels at being a character study of Colin, what led him to this relationship, and how it impacted his life in the long run. Both have their strengths and both take the audience along for a hell of a ride on the back of their bike.

Would I Recommend It: Yes. Pillion slightly more than Box Hill, but yes to both.