I wonder how many times the publisher made “Sweet Mammary” jokes.
I can’t remember the title/author, but the heroine was the daughter of some intellectual, who had educated her far beyond the norm of women. (Set in England in the 18-somethings.) Father dead, she lives alone in his city house and supports herself teaching proper speaking to would be social climbers.
He is a ratter. Yup, a ratter. With the help of some ferrets he goes around to houses and kills the vermin.
The story starts with him admiring her legs (skirts pulled high because a rat is loose in the clothing store) and then he gets in trouble because someone assumes he’s been molesting the shop girl he was canoodling with. He runs off, chased by many, ends up in the tea shop where Leggy Girl is having a tea. More chaos and such. Two sporting gentlemen end up making a bet that Leggy Girl can’t get Ratter Man to pass as a Real Gent as some upcoming social event.
Anyway, she succeeds with a lot of dancing in the attic and at a low class dive along the way oh, yeah, and she gets deflowered by him while standing in the alley behind the dive…so romantic!
Eventually they marry, of course, but it’s all right – turns out he’s the long lost son of some rich man, stolen away by his Irish nursemaid…
Tsk. Somebody needs to explain to the author, " You misread the plot-outline manual. A romance hero has to be a bold, devil-may-care ‘bad boy.’ You know, a rotter. A rotter!"
OK, here we go.
Plot: Our narrator, B., a 19-year-old college student, has recently, and reluctantly, concluded that he is gay. He has begun surfing the net for gay porn and “with a sigh of frustration, I resigned myself to the lifestyle and orientation that was, despite my hopes to the contrary, my own . . . I finally allowed the radiant rainbow to penetrate my being.”
He ditches class – excuse me, “I decided to abandon my pedantic pledge” – one day and go shopping. At the mall, he meets N., a young man who works in a “perfume and skincare solution center.” They flirt a little until another customer comes in.
The narrator is compelled to go back to see N. He almost chickens out, but is emboldened by an inspirational greeting card he sees in a “stationary shop.” “Plucking the raven rectangle away from its hundreds of similar siblings, I studied the front cover.” N. asks to see him later that evening, and B. picks him up after work. In the car, he realizes “He was no longer simply a sprightly skincare advisor but instead, my celestial soul mate.”
I’m going to type that one again:
“He was no longer simply a sprightly skincare advisor but instead, my celestial soul mate.”
They get to N’s. place, and he opens the door: “Inserting it into the lock, he twisted the key, thus manipulating its internal mechanism. The door slid open on reflex, inviting us inside.”
They sit around for a while and look at N’s. drawings, and N. tells B. he’s attracted to him. B. answers, “N., do you have any idea just how hard I’ve fallen for you? Jesus, I mean my desire is downright dangerous. When I’m around you, I can’t think straight or solidify thought. Why do you think I’m so frequently taciturn when with you? It’s not because I’m bashful,” I explained, shaking my head in disbelief. “It’s because I’m so damn scared of making a mistake and lessening the likelihood of our being together. N., I barely know you but I know this,” . . .
He traced the outline of a heart on my palm, its once scaly surface pasty with perspiration.
“You have all of me. Every fiber, every cell, every staple of my sordid self. I’m sorry if this is all too much, too early, but I can’t keep it bottled any longer. I don’t know where this is coming from or why and I’m not exactly sure if I’m prepared to face the repercussions of my rapture but this is it; this is me . . . and you,” I blurted accusingly, “you consume me.”
They make out for a while and then N. starts to rant about his apartment. The air conditioning, the windows.
“. . . It goes without saying that I’m uncomfortable with the insecurity that an open window offers. Who knows what might attempt an invasion, be it a curious critter or a malevolent murderer.” B. decides to leave, crestfallen that he doesn’t even have N.'s phone number.
Next chapter: “Although I would have much preferred to begin my day with a healthy serving of N.'s lips, I settled for dry cereal and a rotten banana.”
He’s late for school and can’t find his car keys:
“Turning round, my eyes eventually located the tangle of misplaced metallic instruments situated atop yet another piece of my mom’s Post-it poetry. Sliding the tortuous tracts of metal aside, I scanned her curt correspondence.”
N. has promised to call the next day, but does not. So B. calls him at work and asks to come over. N. agrees. While he’s climbing the stairs, a couple of them collapse: “Less than twenty-four hours prior, I’d clamored down the corridor, every stair intact. Since then, two members of the timbered community had commited suicide, their splintered remains resting in the grassy knoll below.”
B. eventually makes it up the rest of the stairs, where N. is noncommital about seeing him, but presents him with a birthday cake, though it’s not B.'s birthday. N. then explains it’s their one-week anniversary, though B. “reviewed our romantic timeline” and figures out they’d known each other three days.
Before they can cut the cake, N. comes on strong, ripping off his shirt. “A conflagration of carnal passion consumed every fiber of my now-smoldering being. I was his for the taking, my bumper harvest ready to be reaped.”
“In employing a dexterous hand, my erotic illusionist expelled from sight our ancillary trappings; restrictive pants were cast aside whilst tightly-hugging boxer-briefs endured. Bodies synchronized, mine below his, our caged vipers hissed for release. Though separated by way of a cotton-spandex blockade, the two ever-stiffening shafts could perceive of one another’s presence and in anticipation, grew further engorged.”
Then there’s a whole lot more of that.
B wakes up and finds N. has gone and left a note asking him to come back that evening. When he returns, he finds 'what appeared to be an ill-disguised transvestite of beastly proportions. Circles of rouge dotted her drooping cheeks; streaks of sapphire highlighted her tired eyes; two watermelon-sized cups of brazier [sic] accentuated her mammoth chest; what seemed a dry and dirty horsehair wig covered her bulbous skull."
This apparition turns out to be N’s. former girlfriend and mother of his child. “We were eighteen,” he explains. S. sends B. out for cigarettes; curiously, he agrees. When she comes back, they all decide to repair to the nearby gay bar. On the way, S. regales B. with tales of her heroin use.
When they come back, they sleep for a while and B. awakes to find N. raping him: “He was forcing an agonizing infiltration through a fissure half as wide as his intruder. He was slowly progressing toward penetration.” Then B. leaves. The next day, N. calls but hangs up before B. answers.
FIN.
No, that’s it, really. Oh, wait, the press release! “It goes further in revealing the potentially devastating consequenses of such a polarized pairing, what can happen when intentions are ill, motivations malignant.”
If you want any more quotes from this gem, hurry up. The trash goes out tonight.
Damn those restrictive pants! Always slightly delaying a good time.
Yeesh, Sigmagirl! Are you sure you didn’t mean to post that in the decomposing mongoose thread?
Author and title for my contribution left out not to protect the guilty but because I honestly cannot remember them. But the book is about the daughter of one lord and a second lord, the hero, who is the heroine’s father’s mortal enemy and also owns the manse next door. (Setting: Medieval England.) Heroine is wandering through the woods and is captured by Hero, who kidnaps her to his castle and then proceeds to hostilely pressure her to sex him. She refuses because he is being a gold-plated asshole and finally, to escape him, she leaps out the window. (Mmmm, sounds like Mr. Right, huh?) But don’t worry! She doesn’t die, she just has . . . wait for it . . . amnesia. Of course. He is distraught and repentant, so he keeps her because now she doesn’t know who he is and therefore doesn’t hate him. (Nevermind the ethics/morals of it, just run with it!) They fall in love and screw each other all over the castle and grounds. Then they are boffing each other under a tree and the tree gets hit by lightning, a branch falls and bonks the heroine on the head, and she recovers her memory.
I’m honestly not sure how the book ends, though I can only assume they overcome his dickishness and her repeated head injuries to live happily ever after. I don’t know how it ends, though, because when I got to the scene under the tree, I threw the book across the room. Then I picked it up and threw it in the trash. Then I fished it out of the trash and drowned it in a sinkful of water to make sure no one else would ever read it. I’ve never had my intelligence so insulted by a book.
The upside was that it was the point at which I honestly thought, “I can write better than this,” which helped give me the personal courage to start writing.
Snort.
“Solidify my thoughts”? And I thought Dean Koontz wrote bad dialogue.
Please don’t keep it bottled any longer.
That sounds awfully familiar, I’m ashamed to say. Was there more than on satyr? Wasn’t there some sort of breeding program, and one gal sees a case file on it? The “satyrs” looked like men until some trigger event that transforms them. A secret ceremony in an abandoned church, at night, when the victims are ravished by the satyr.
I’m going to hate myself for remembering all of this crap.
This has GOT to be a chapter from Atlanta Nights.
I’ve blotted most of this book out of my head, and I’m not sure it will really win any awards except for Most Inappropriate Gift Giver Ever. I recall the writing being really quite good, but it’s been a while.
See, I was about eleven or twelve. (Already this is good.) I was a big big fan of historical fiction, especially for medieval England, because I was A) a big ol’ girl and B) a big ol’ geek.
So my grandmother bought me The Shield of Three Lions.
The cover looked like a lovely medieval tapestry. The inner flap promised a captivating story of a young girl who went to war with Richard the Lionhearted and gave a fascinating picture of medieval Europe.
This was, therefore, stealth smut.
See, the main character is a girl of about eleven (!) named Alix. She romps around northern England, daughter of some lord or other, until bandits come on market day and rape and pillage. She sees… oh, her sister or her best friend or her mother or someone raped to death in impressive detail. She goes and kisses her father goodbye as he dies and then shears off all her hair, dresses as a boy, and runs off to prevent herself from getting raped to death. So far, so reasonable. :dubious:
She meets up with a Scotsman. I can’t recall if he was one of the rape-and-pillagers or not. She travels with him for safety – he thinks she’s just a pretty boy, after all, and apparently the Scotsman doesn’t want to see the kid cornholed. After all, he likes girls.
He also may be nearly the only man in the book who does. Oh, except for the dude in the inn they stay at who cheerily recounts the delights of sleeping with a woman while she’s menstruating.
At some point Alix kisses a goat’s ass to appease some Satan worshipers, I think. Or it’s threatened that she’ll have to. Or she’ll have to either kiss it or screw it, which would prove tricky.
Eventually she and her Scotsman end up in Richard’s army. Richard immediately horns in on the pretty boy and makes Alix his page, eventually trying to get into the kid’s pants and being awfully disappointed to discover she has a velvet butterfly instead of a throbbing manhood.
She bugs out eventually, making her way back to England, and I think she loses track of the randy Scotsman at some point. I know she runs into Robin Hood. I think he realizes she’s female and tries to make it with her. Possibly a couple of years have passed and she’s got some appropriate bumps, I really don’t recall. She feels kind of bad for Maid Marian – chick’s saving herself and thinks Robin is too, when really Robin is doing the squat-thrust with every velvet butterfly (my God, I love that phrasing) in sight.
Eventually she gets back home. She owns it, after all, and figures she probably shouldn’t have just run away from the rape gangs for so long. She finds the Scotsman again at some point, marries him, and the two have lots of really messed up babies.
I’m sure I didn’t make it up. The book’s still in print, after all. I kind of want to read it again to see if it is as messed up as I remember.
Oh, for all that is holy.
It has a sequel.
This is just after I got done reading The Lion in Winter, too.
Pepper Mill can’t remember the name of it, but she still remembers the geographic howlers in a romance she read in the 1970s. It had Cornwall located right next to Scotland.
Oh, dude! Little Plastic Ninja, I read that and the sequel at nerd camp and I’ve been looking for it again ever since! I’m not sure that you really focused enough in your summary on the major plot point that Alix thinks Richard has discovered her secret and lusts after her because she’s a hot female, but he really wants her because he thinks she’s a hot prepubescent boy.
It’s so romantic, innit?
I’m completely picking these up from the store next time I go. I need a good cackle.
<giggle>
But, actually, the writer made a brilliant choice of careers for the hero. What could possibly get a girl’s juices flowing hotter than watching her guy stomp rats to death?
Oh, I just remembered truly dreadful one. It’s an American girl, present day, over in some non-real ‘Arab’ country, and she gets kidnapped by some Arab sheik, who isn’t of course a real arab.
After a bunch of “I hate you” “you’re beautiful when you’re angry” foreplay, she and he go through this really, really disgusting binding ceremony. Both get some elaborate design knife-carved into their palms, and the bloody palms bound together for a day, or maybe two or whatever. Of course I’m expecting one or both of them to develop a nasty infection and have to at least have their hand amputated, but no such luck.
After a bunch of ‘political’ warfare/assasination attempts between the pseudo-Arab’s side and that of a real Arab sheik (though, who knows? From these books, it would seem that at least 90% of all Arab sheiks are really American or European adventures in disguise) she is convinced he has been killed and she gets rushed back to American on the dead-fake-sheik’s private airplane.
I believe she is preggie by now. Anyway, she goes home to her large “close” “loving” family in Wisconsin or a state nearby. She’s all despairy, is hadly eating, and takes to sitting on a box on the ice in the middle of a frozen lake for hours and hours every day. See, it would be wrong to kill herself, but if the ice should just happen to fail while she’s sitting out there…
And, no surprise, all these close, loving relatives sit by while this is going on for months. Hey, you wouldn’t expect the people who love her to interfere or anything, right? No insisting she get couselling, no pink sheeting. Just let the girl brood out on the frozen lake until the thaw comes.
Well, maybe they liked her as little as I did.
Anyway, ‘the rumors of my death’ etc, and the fake sheik turns up and they live happily ever after.
Ick.
Actually, I think this was an ebook, being given away for free… I wonder why? The title was the name of the binding ceremony, something like “The Kalamanch.”
I just can’t remember. I’ve read the Johanna Lindsay novel and a Beatrice Small and some of the more modern romances, but the author/title escapes me. However, reading the posts here, there are apparently a lot of romances that fit my description. 
Now you know what would be really brilliant? If someone could actually combine those two most unlikely of genres–the Amish romance and the Nascar romance.
Antidisestablishmenteria clutched her diary to her heaving bosom and gazed across the moonlit lake. She had to make a choice. Who was her true love, her soul mate? Was it Jeff, so handsome and dashing in his dangerous race car, or was it Jacob, so manly and stoic in his horse and buggy with the reflective orange triangle on the back?
This is perhaps the most powerful real-life example of the old maxim, “Every cloud has a silver lining” I have ever read.