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

Cafe Society
101

Well, I think there are many sterling examples of bad plotting in this thread alone. It would take a hell of an accomplished author to convincingly pull off the following:
[ul]
[li]Hero insisting it’s not rape because he used lube in his attack on the heroine[/li][li]Hero lancing a boil on the heroine’s ass[/li][li]Hero who can only get hard with another guy in the room + must have anal sex[/li][li]Heroine skinny-dipping in the Scottish Highlands. In February.[/li][li]Heroine losing memory from a conk on the head, then recovering it after another conk on the head[/li][/ul]
Now you pair that kind of plotting with mediocre or atrocious writing, and you’ve got yourself a terrible romance novel.

I’d say your post only proves that romance can offer vibrant, enjoyable, believable reading when created by a talented author. But like every genre, it has its share of pure dreck.

102

Oh dear heaven - I read that one. It was by Dorothy Garlock, I think. No clue what the title is as she’s rather prolific. Often tells a nice enough story but yeesh, the odd speech patterns. I mean, who on EARTH says “I’ll not” or “He’ll not” rather than “I won’t” or “He won’t”. Was that common usage 50-100-150 years ago?

“Six Foot Four
Man of Gor
Will He Beat Me Any More
Has Anybody Seen Myyyy Maaaaaaaan”
(No, I haven’t read any of the Gor books. And in fairness, that ditty isn’t original either - someone sang it in a skit at a SF convention in Chapel Hill back in the 80s).

Not sure I’d count Gor as “romance”, as they’re not written with the usual target audience (females) in mind.

103

I can’t read Jane Austen either (and I’ve tried).

I just find the whole idea of romance, as a theme or a subject, to be inherently uninteresting. I’ve never understood why anybody does find it interesting or entertaining. I think the genre is the female equivalent of porn. It’s ludicrous sexual fantasy, just like regular porn, but with extra dollops of turgid emotionalism, which, I guess, serves the same purpose as the mechanical sexual action in male-geared porn (something which is probably just as inherently boring to women as the emotionalism is to men).

104

Be my guest!

(I’ve never been sigged before…:D)

105

okay… i found and dug out “captive bride” by ms lindsey.

indeed philip’s name was sheik abu alhamar. his father was an arab and had kidnapped his mother, they had 2 children one of which is philip. his mum goes back to england with the kids and they are raised and educated in england. phil kidnaps christina from a train and takes her off into the desert to convince her to submit to him. (just like dear ole dad).

clothes are riped, tushes are spanked, stabbing attempts, all the true love bases are covered. his father passes and christina is kidnapped by sheik ali. during her kidnapping she decides she loves philip, truely loves him, and if he finds her and recues her she will show him her love.

of course philip goes off to rescue her. he finds her in the sheik’s camp and finds out about the woman his father was to have married after his mum went back to england. his father did not marry her, but did get drunk and had a bit of a disaster of a non wedding night. that resulted in another son and the mother commiting suicide from the shame (years later) so her brother kidnapes christina as a revenge trap. thus the sunburn horrour.

he is released by one of the camp members amair, who’s sister is married to one of phil’s camp members. he sets phil and tina free. phil and tina are quite a pair as phil is burnt to a chrisp and tina is badly bruised from a beating she got during an escape attempt. they manage to get back to phil’s camp.

after 10 days of healing they finally pitch a tent. so, of course, a few days later phil askes his half brother to take tina back to her brother. after a near thing with an english “gentleman” and the fact that she is pregnant, she decides to go back to england where people won’t know she had been kidnapped and living in the desert.

naturally she goes back to her estate and tells everyone she was never married. yep, that’s really a great idea. her childhood friend tommy is not happy about this but tries to convince her to marry him. we are right back were we started the book.

tommy doesn’t back off and she decides to go elsewhere to have the baby. she goes to victory the estate owned by the caxton family. she and her nurse decide that philip couldn’t be related to them for he is “no gentleman”!

she finds out that indeed philip is related. she names her son philip junior. philip comes back to england to sell everything and go to america where he can forget his love of tina. he arrives home in time to hear tina agree after much pestering to marry tommy. yes, tommy tracked her down.

big argument, phil and tommy smackdown, junior makes his presence known, the music swells, phil and tina declare their love, all live happily ever after.

106

hey, duck duck goose, i got a nice blaze book for you. a man from another planet comes to earth, overwhelms a woman, has her walking around naked, and i believe there may even be spanking!

107

I dug out my S.J. Perlman anthology and found some of the “Cloudland Revisted” pieces. Here are a couple of excerpts:

From “Into Your Tent I’ll Creep”:

*The opening paragraph of The Sheik is possibly the most superb example of direct plot expositon in the language. Instead of fussing over the table decorations and place cards, like so many novelists, the author whisks open the door of the range and serves the soufflé piping hot. In the very first line of the book, a disembodied voice asks someone named Lady Conway whether she is coming to watch the dancing and gets a tart reply: “I most decidedly am not. I thoroughly disapprove of the expedition of which this dance is the inauguration. I consider that even by contemplating such a tour alone into the desert with no chaperon or attendant of her own sex, with only native cameldrivers and servants, Diana Mayo is behaving with a recklessness and impropriety that is calculated to cast a slur not only on her own reputation, but also on the prestige of her country… It
is the maddest piece of unprincipled folly I have ever heard of.”

That, I submit, is literary honesty of a high order, to say nothing of a forensic style that Cicero would have envied. It does not abuse the reader’s patience with a complex psychological probe of Diana’s youth, her awakening womanhood, her revolt against narrow social conventions. It tells him, with a minimum of flubdub that a madcap miss is going to be loused up by Arabs and that there will be no exchanges or refunds.*

108

From “Tuberoses and Tigers”:
…Readers would do well to hold Three Weeks at arms length unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives.

Also this:

A few hours after finishing Three Weeks, there came to me out of the blue a supurb concept for a romatic novel upon which I have ben laboring like a demon ever since. In essence, it is the story of an incredibly handsome and wealthy youth of forty-four whose wife and children, dismayed by hsi infatuation for servant girl literature, pack him off to Switzerland. There he meets and falls in love with a ravishing twenty-three-year-old girl, half tigress and half publisher. The tigress in her fascinates him at the same time that the publisher revolts him, and out of this ambivalence, grows the conflict…

109

I have ready many bad romance novels which have been thrown against the wall. When it’s not 1AM I will see if I can recall some well enough to summarize.

In the meantime, this blog is hilarious: http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/

Search the archives for their D and F reviews for some particularly ridiculous books.

110

Thank you! If I have a copy it’s boxed up somewhere, so now I feel less guilty about failing to retrieve it!

111

What, BG, ya think soft porn stopped, or people stopped liking it, because of feminism? I’ll bet a lot of feminists like soft porn.

112

Wouldn’t it make for better suspense, if there’s more than one potential love interest for the woman introduced in the first couple of chapters, and it’s not at all clear until the middle of the book or later which one she’s going to end up with? Or the same, but genders reversed?

Why are romance novels never written like that? (I have read books where that’s part of the plot, but they’re definitely outside the romance genre – i.e., the relationships are not what the story is about.)

113

What, even with rape glorified?! You know what I mean – the kind of story where the man (well, in this story the non-human humanoid male) forces himself on the woman and she’s reluctant at first but before long she can’t get enough. IME, feminists hate that sort of thinking with a cold passion, on the assumption that it’s exactly what underlies much real-life incidence – and more importantly tolerance – of rape.

114

It was in Dickens’ time and I believe it still is in some English-speaking countries.

115

I’ll take a stab at answering – I think it comes down to what the readers of “romance” novels want. Which is, they want to identify with the heroine and have a perfect, happily ever after ending. IOW, it has to fit into the ‘There is ONE true love’ trope, which is why only one truly suitable mate. And as for two heroines – horrors! What if the reader is identifying with Alice and waiting for her to win the guy, and instead Betty gets him??? Utterly unsatisfying to the reader. I’d bet she’d never read another romance by that author.
There is one exception to the ‘only one man’ pattern, and that’s in romances that include mystery or suspense aspects. Then there will be two men for the heroine to be torn between. Most likely one man will be blond, fair of face, of good family and well thought of and the other will have dark hair, with 'irregular but strangely intriguing features, possibly including a not-at-all disfiguring facial scar, who will be either a stranger to the local society or maybe an outcast.

Guess which one turns out to be a kitten-raping ax-murderer and which one is noble and kind despite having suffered unfair turns of fate in the past. :rolleyes:

116

Are (non-gay) romances always written for female readers?

(Guess so, based on responses in this thread. What’s written for male readers is called “porn.”)

117

Thread on the absence of love triangles in romance novels.

In manga or anime, OTOH, you can get a love dodecahedron.

118

Thanks for posting this, Di – I’ll have to find my copy and give it a re-read.

You don’t hear the phrase “servant girl literature” enough these days.

119

I am just back from my business trip, during which I had no access, and have read with mixed dismay and gratitude what happened on this thread during my absence. I want to say that I really didn’t mean to start a controversy, by posting excerpts from a book without citing the author and title, and I apologize again to those who found it objectionable. I won’t do it again.

Back to the thread topic, I have little to contribute, except that I recall one sort of anthology of erotic stories in which one man announced to his lover that he was going to perform anal sex on her. Hearing no objection, he then proceeded to do so. The publisher had a sort of disclaimer in the front of the book stating that they didn’t use stories glorifying rape, so I figured that they considered this “tacit approval” – she didn’t say no. I don’t remember the author or title, so can’t supply, but I remember that the context of the story was such that the woman seemed quite intimidated. I did not find it erotic.

I asked a librarian once if he had a strict definition of the difference between “romance” and “chick lit.” He did not, and I wonder if anyone knows of an article that’s been written about it.

120

WAG: The whole focus of a romance novel, the entire point, is to get the heroine into a relationship with her true love. Any other story elements are merely there to provide “color” and barely distinguish them from other romance novels. In a “chick lit” book, romance is important but so is her career / problem with her best friend / etc. and by the end of the book, all of those problems should be wrapped up.

I don’t remember the story but one romance novel I read had the conceit of the woman had fallen asleep on a bed during a party. The romantic hero came in and saw this lovely woman, and went over to check her out. She half woke up and thought he was a dream so she acted all interested in him, and he got to the point where he’d just about penetrated her, and suddenly she realized this was real, and “woke up” and screamed, in time for a passer-by to hear and burst in. I’m sure the rest was something to do with him being driven off as a cad and having to leave for a while, but hell if I remember.