Needed: some really filthy romance novels

Bodice rippers are a guilty pleasure of my SO, but she’s often complained that the ones she finds are too tame. I thought: “Aha! Easy holiday present!”

But looking through the shelves at Barnes & Noble, I have the same problem: even though Fabio’s on the cover, there’s not much steamy sex. The love scenes are vague, only one paragraph long, and only happen every hundred pages or so. I’d like to get her something really awful: the whole “his throbbing member was hard as iron but soft as velvet” thing every thirty pages. You know what I mean.

I’m not sure about the distinction between “romance” and “erotica.” I don’t think she wants the latter, but I could be wrong.

So help me out. I’ll take suggestions for specific authors or titles, tips on where to look, or suggestions for search terms.

Harold Robbins. Jackie Collins.

Cat beat me to it; I was going to say Robbins.

The imprint “Brava” was formed when an editor at Kensington (a prominent romance publisher) was in a bookstore and thought to herself, “how do I know which ones are really raunchy?” Thus was Brava born. A line of romance novels which all have highly explicit content.

browse at your leisure:
http://www.bravaauthors.com/

Bertrice Small, Thea Devine and Susan Johnson are all authors you can look out for.

Try some of these.

Outlander Series. Part historical fiction, part steamy romance. A really good read. 1st and 2nd books were my favorites.

I can’t resist a plug…

May I recommend some books that aren’t filthy but might make a good present anyway, if you want a funny gift for a romance fan? Google for a company called Romance By You (it’s the obvious URL; I’m not linking to it because I don’t want to get in trouble from mods). It’s a site that creates personalized romance novels. You fill in a form and put your wife’s name as the heroine (and your own, if you wanna play the hero), and add her and your hair color, eye color, etc. You can even upload a picture for the back cover.

Disclaimer: I wrote three books published there and will vouch for the quality (of those three, anyway), but we’re not talking genius literature by any stretch. I fully admit they’re fluffy and cliched but the fun is in getting to play the hunky hero and feisty heroine yourselves. You get to be Fabio and Fabiolla, in other words. :slight_smile: Oh and they have free demos too.

BTW, I don’t get any royalties and I’m not profiting financially from any sales, so my hands are clean!

Jayne Anne Krentz, who also writes as Amanda Quick. Look for her earlier books – she got into this whole paranormal thing (in both her contemporaries and her regencies) a few years ago that I don’t care for.

Let me just say, Jayne Ann Krentz and Diana Gabaldon are both
a. too skilled as writers and
b. not that raunchy.
to be what the OP is looking for.

Outlander is maybe, 10% sex scenes and 90% perfectly decent novel. Y’all are sheltered if you think that’s a “really sex-filled bad romance novel.” It gets waaay more sextactular and way way way badder. :slight_smile:

To be clear Harold Robbins doesn’t write romance novels, and neither does Jackie Collins. Harold Robbins can be kind of explicit, but not in the “throbbing member” sort of way. His style is very different. Jackie Collins, I remember as being similar to Danielle Steele – lots of smoldering looks and the odd erect nipple but kind of vague on the sex thing. Correct me if I’m wrong on that.

Really? Maybe it’s because I read Outlander when I was 14, but I remember there being a sex scene, like, every four pages in that book. Which made it fucking hilarious when Gabaldon got all het up this year about people writing sex-filled fanfiction about her characters as though that was sullying their purity or something. But it’s true that, comparatively, they’re not so graphic.

What you want to do is look for specifically erotic romance. Digital first publishers (epublishers) are your best bet for genuinely raunchy books. Samhain, Loose ID, and Ellora’s Cave all have erotic romance (explicit sex scenes, several scenes, often involving various kinks) books available in trade paperback. The books can be hit-or-miss due to the number published on a monthly basis, but that means there’s a pretty good variety, too. Which means you can probably shop based on her kink and preferences, rather than trying to just randomly hit something she likes.

Kensington’s Aphrodesic line is more erotica than romance, but if she doesn’t need a traditional HEA, that’s a good place to look, too.

If she likes series romance rather single-title romance, then Harlequin’s Spice and Blaze lines both have more explicit scenes.

Honestly, I’m stunned she has that complaint at all, which makes me think she reads Harlequin Romance or Presents lines, which traditionally have very little sex. The trend over the past six or seven years has been increasingly towards explicit sex. In fact, I had a book rejected by agents specifically because there was not enough sex in it, and publishers simply aren’t interested in books that aren’t explicit right now–because readers aren’t interested in it. There’s more erotic/explicit books out there than she could read in a lifetime (and if she likes gay romance or menage romance than her options increase exponentially).

Robin Schone, The Lady’s Tutor. Hells yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of her work has a very uncomfortable homophobic vibe that keeps me from recommending anything else - there’s a little bit of that in this one but the plot makes it make sense and hell you aren’t reading it for the plot anyway.
ETA - that book is a little spoiled for me because a guy friend found it in my carryon on vacation once and opened it to a random page and did a hilarious reading that completely desexed the whole endeavor past present and future. God, it was funny. But un-sexy.

I just picked up Skintight as an audio book from the library. It’s “women’s fiction” so I don’t know if that qualifies as “romance” but the sex scenes are steamy. :slight_smile:

Wow! Ok, I am going to have to do this for my sweetie for Valentine’s Day. We each had several years of online RP and RP writing before we met each other, but our online characters <in a game, DAoC> were never closely associated.

This sounds like a perfect opportunity to play out some things we couldn’t do back then, muahahaha!

Lora Leigh is good for that sort of thing I find.

I’ve mostly read her Breeds books (genetically modified people, human and animal DNA) and the SEALs (as in Navy…) books and the Bound Hearts series.

I find them perfect for if I want lots of hot sexy scenes and depending what sort of mood I’m in they can often fill them. Breeds is more… animalistic I guess you could say. Lots of those genetic differences making things interesting. SEALs is pretty average gals falling in love with SEALs and having lots of fun when they’re on leave, and the Bound Hearts really falls into the alternative lifestyles (threesomes, sharing, etc) and I consider to be more erotic than some specifically erotica books I’ve read…

Anne Rice did a few “erotica” novels-- The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.

I say go for it and get a copy of Santa Steps Out for an early Xmas gift.

Beatrice Small and Kathleen Woodweis their early stuff is quite steamy.

The Story of O

Try the urban/paranormal romance genre. I happened to pick up You Slay Me by Katie MacAlister and the sex scenes were surprisingly erotic. The story wasn’t all that much, though.

Black Lace books.
“the leading imprint of erotic fiction for women”