Summarize the worst romance novel you've read (spoilers, mockery)

Cafe Society
21

I’ve read a lot of dreck over the years and some particularly hilarious dreck sticks in the mind, like dog poop on your shoe.

In a “romance” novel set in modern times involving a mercenary soldier and a damsel in some kind of distress (I think - I may have blotted much of the actual story out of my mind) the damsel slides her delicate pink hand into the hero’s trews and finds - wait for it! - a “granite monument”. :eek: I didn’t finish it, I gave up not long after that astonishing discovery, but the description of his erection has stayed with me. Even now I’m laughing!

In another story set in 1700’s Scotland, the heroine decides to go bathing in a burn. In February. In the highlands. The hero, astride his noble steed, spots her from afar. Pretty afar, as I recall. So it takes him a long time to get there. And she is washing her girly bits, etc., a lot of rosy-tipped mounds and swelling buttocks. Eventually he gets there and sweeps her wet and naked self out of the water onto the back of his horse and rides off with her and rapes her a bunch of times, etc., the usual.

I suspect the author, who displayed a dismal lack of historical knowledge, also displayed a dismal lack of understanding of the Scots dialect. I suspect she thought a “burn” was something warm, not the Scots name for a creek and that the water is frigid in those things even in July and our heroine would have died of hypothermia long, long, long before the raping hero on his noble steed was within poking distance. Another book flung across the room, I’m afraid. But I know what happened, we all do. :rolleyes:

Also, any book by Diana Gabaldon. Jeez. :mad:

22

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Are rape fantasies a frequent feature of these romance novels? I don’t understand that. And these are women writing these things? I’m befuddled. Why would that be seen as a romantic or erotic quality in a man?
[/QUOTE]

That’s what they all really want, dude, they just don’t know it, and don’t never let a bitch tell you different . . .

Seriously, I doubt one rape victim in a thousand gets any joy or pleasure out of it IRL . . . but I could see how it could still be an enjoyable erotic fantasy, an expression of the man’s overwhelming strength and passion and studliness, etc. Of course, that’s just a guy’s guess, based on the fact that so many romance-novel heroes are, if not rapists, then definitely strong and studly. (Brains appreciated too but only for practical or money-making purposes; no intellectuals need apply.) Your opinions, ladies?

23

I can’t top Beadalin’s.
I did read too many of Johanna Lindsey’s “isn’t rape romantic?” books years and years ago. (Diogenes, rape stories were a trend in certain types of romance novels for a while. That is less likely to be true in the last 10 years or so. But “romance novel” is a fairly broad genre with a ton of sub genres.) More recently I’ve run across some of the “isn’t dysfunctional, controlling behavior romantic?” books (Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb, Stephanie Plum’s “romance” novels), but being older, I did throw those across the room.

One of the weirdest, though, was one where nothing happened. It was set somewhere on the gulf coast - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again…by page 25 of a 300-something page book. Then they spent a page worrying if their parents would approve. And they did! on page 30! Then there was a hurricane (which took a good 10 pages) but no one got injured, so the couple could go ahead with their wedding plans. Then, I think she got pregnant, but everyone was happy! So no big deal. The author had heard that the couple should run into obstacles on the way to true love, so she put them in and resolved them immediately.

24

[QUOTE=Motorgirl]
::groan::
I can’t believe I’m about to admit this but… I know that book really well. I must have read it 20 times when I was 13 or so. It’s the other way around - Philip is left in the sun to die but then rescued and she has to nurse him back to health and then she realizes she loves him and then escapes and goes back to England. There is a patently absurd coincidence where she, as an unmarried pregnant harlot, goes to a FOAF’s estate to give birth in private and IT TURNS OUT TO BE PHILIP’s estate. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]

I might be getting my “sheik” romances confused–was this the one where he has a harem of 3 ladies, and he does pleasure them, but he finds them boring and only the heroine can quench his manly thirst? Or is this the one where there’s another sheik or something in the area who only likes teenage boys? Or am I talking about 3 different books altogether?

People refer to the rapes as “forced seductions” (I wish I was making that up) and most publishers explicitly say they don’t want them. They’ve actually fallen out of favor in the past decade (most of the books mentioned here are not recent releases). There are a lot of theories about why forced seductions were so popular in the early years of romance–I think the most popular one is that if a woman can’t say no she can’t be held accountable, and therefore, it’s okay to have sex. I’m just happy that the rape scenes really are becoming a distant memory, rather than a romance mainstay (though I’m not saying you’ll not find any current forced seductions, just that they are increasingly rare).

My contribution is a book called Decadent by Shayla Black. The characters are a grab-bag of neurosis. The Hero has a fetish for threesomes. He cannot get a boner unless there is another man in the room (but he IS NOT GAY!). He also refuses to devirginize women. His fetish is widely known and talked about, and when Heroine begins seeing him, people warn her about his crazy fetish. She’s a virgin, but is certain she can’t protect her virginity by having anal sex with two men. Oh, and she’s also training herself so she can sleep with a pop-star who has a thing for 3somes (he is also NOT GAY! Man, just because a guy can’t get a boner without another cock in the room doesn’t make him gay. Why does everybody always think that?! :rolleyes: )

Classic Dialogue:
“What are you doing?” Luc barked.
“Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

Yes, Hero is certain if he pops her cherry, he will kill her. Because when he fucked his high school girlfriend, she got pregnant and killed herself. Incidentally, that’s why he needs another man (his friend Luc) in the room. So if the woman gets preggars (not that she will since they only have anal sex) he has plausible deniability. Because where he comes from, there is no paternity test. Or birth control.

He eventually pops her cherry, they get rid of the friend, and instead of going into therapy, they live happily ever after.

25

[QUOTE=CaerieD]
Beautiful and willful (naturally) Christina runs off to the Arabian desert for adventure after turning down this guy, Phillip, who had wanted to marry her a few minutes after he laid eyes on her and declared he was never getting married. Ah, but then it turns out that Phillip is secretly Sheik Abu!!! I can’t remember much about the plot beyond the fact that he kidnaps her and rapes her.
[/QUOTE]

Jeez…didn’t Edith Maude Hull first come up with this plot in 1919?

26

Sweet Ember( I think) by Barbara Delinsky.

Which I first read a decade ago, and recently re-read, because I was on a Delinsky kick and I wasn’t sure at first whether the book I was reading was the same book I’d read before or just one with a similar plot.

Sweet, young, virginal Stephenie falls in love with Douglas Weston, an older man, while both work at a summer camp. At the end of the summer, they have one night of passion, and the next day Stephenie finds “Mrs. Weston” packing his clothes. She flees.

Eight years later, they both return to the camp, along with their eight year old daughter. He’s pissed and betrayed because she departed without a word to him. She’s annoyed because this man she didn’t want in her life after he betrayed her is now teaching tennis to their daughter, and she doesn’t want him to hurt the girl the way he hurt her.

Eventually they actually talk to each other and figure out that they’ve been separated for eight years because she mistook his beautiful blond SISTER for his WIFE.

Bugged me big time. He’s kind of a jerk, and she’s kind of stupid, but mostly it pissed me off that they spent eight years separated, hurt and betrayed over such a teeny misunderstanding. And then, in the space of a heartbeat, or maybe two, they decide to kiss and make up, and all’s well that end’s well.

27

[QUOTE=jsc1953]
Jeez…didn’t Edith Maude Hull first come up with this plot in 1919?
[/QUOTE]

Eh? Petruchio doesn’t rape Kate (though as her husband he has the right, by standards of the time); he tames her through psychological torture. (In the 1967 version with Elizabeth Taylor, BTW, even a feminist should want to see Kate broken; she’s not just an uppity woman who won’t obey any man, she’s a total psycho who assaults everyone she sees. Don’t know how true that adaptation is to the original.)

28

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Eh?
[/QUOTE]

Just for the record, I noticed the plot similarities between The Captive Bride and The Sheik (woman kidnapped & raped by a sheik who’s really not an Arab at all). Comparing either of them to Taming of the Shrew seems a bit of a stretch, made by some guy on Wikipedia.

29

In other puzzling romance subgenres, I just found out yesterday that there’s a whole line of Nascar-themed Harlequin novels.

:confused:

30

I think it’s important to distinguish, for purposes of discussion, the distinction between yer “bodice ripper”, which generally has “forced seduction”, and yer classic “romance novel”, which rarely does. Harlequin Romances don’t have rapes/forced seductions, they barely even have explicit sex.

Jane Austen is widely considered by English Lit geeks to have single-handedly perfected the “romance novel”, so you have to be cautious about using the term in the same breath as books that feature sentences like, “His throbbing organ sprang free…”

I used to use bodice-rippers as what the National Lampoon once termed “emergency porn” (this was before the Internet, children). You could get them for fifty cents at the used bookstore, and I discovered that the juiciest ones were the ones that, if you hold them open on the spine, flop open at certain pages. You could also go by the ones that looked as though they had been dropped in the bathtub.

31

Harlequin romances have plenty of explicit sex these days. Check out the Blaze, Spice, and Nocturne lines. Erotic romance is becoming more popular at the big publishers, and most of them have erotica lines (though I agree, even those are not “bodice rippers.”)

32

Gar. :eek: And here I was thinking there were still some standards out there…

[creeps back to rocking chair]

ETA: [and makes note to go down to Old Book Barn at earliest opp] [heh]

33

[QUOTE=pepperlandgirl]
I might be getting my “sheik” romances confused–was this the one where he has a harem of 3 ladies, and he does pleasure them, but he finds them boring and only the heroine can quench his manly thirst? Or is this the one where there’s another sheik or something in the area who only likes teenage boys? Or am I talking about 3 different books altogether?

[/QUOTE]

Neither of those sound right for Captive Bride, so I suspect you’re thinking of three different books. I’ll take a closer look when I get home. I think I have this book somewhere in the house.

34

[QUOTE=CaerieD]
Motorgirl, can you recall how, exactly, some wealthy English guy turns out to be a sheik? Because I have no recollection of that part.
[/QUOTE]

His father was a sheik and his mother English Nobility. Or vice versa. As I promised **pepperlandgirl **I’ll try to look for it tonight when I get home. The sacrifices I make for you people!

35

[QUOTE=Motorgirl]
Neither of those sound right for Captive Bride, so I suspect you’re thinking of three different books. I’ll take a closer look when I get home. I think I have this book somewhere in the house.
[/QUOTE]

You know what horrifies me? The very real possibility that there exists two books where the good English girl goes back to England to end up on an estate that belongs to the sheik she just left. In the one I’m thinking of, she’s unhappy because she’s used to wearing loose desert clothes and now she’s stuck wearing the constricting dresses in England.

36

Those who enjoy snarky commentary on trashy romantic fiction would probably also enjoy the essays by S.J. Perelman, with the general heading “Cloudland Revisited” – where he recaps and comments on the junk he read and enjoyed in his youth. He wrote 2 relevant to this thread: on The Sheik (referenced above), and on Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks. Absolutely hysterical reading.

37

This site will help you tell one sheik novel from another. It’s all about the sheikh-romance genre and even has a hilarious map of Romance Novel Arabia.

38

This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a romance novel, but one of the worst and seediest books I ever (partially) read was a book set in the modern day where a satyr rapes women to death.

Also, I bought this book at a nursing home garage sale.

Skeevy.

39

[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
Also, I bought this book at a nursing home garage sale.
[/QUOTE]
Ha! I bought the one in the OP at a rummage sale for a hospice. 25 cents and not worth every penny.

And wow, Gala Matrix Fire, I had no idea that there was such a robust sub-genre around sheiks and their women. That site is hilarious.

Win, pepperlandgirl.

40

Sweet Memories by Lavyrle Spencer.

The heroine spends her whole life troubled by her huge, gargantuan breasts. She’s had to give up everything she loves because of her “deformity”, and it takes this fabulous man to see past her “problem”, and so on and so forth…

So, when Ms. Spencer reveals exactly how big this poor girls breasts are…they’re a whopping 34DD.

Yep. 34DD.