Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Dude, I KNOW how harsh that sounds. But my point is - I get it now. See, I shoulda known when you named your hero Lucien that he’d be “tortured” in name only. I should’ve known that this was all one big joke from the moment that Alice - our innocent and proper young thing who, for the sake of a nephew who has chicken pox (and how many times did I yell at the book: “dude, it’s JUST CHICKEN POX”, huh? Brill! You had me right in the palm of your hand!) hares off across the country to fetch her slutball of a sister-in-law at the secret underground grotto where Lucien holds ceremonial-esque orgies for the sake of gathering information about … something. I dunno, you were never all that specific on how any of this helped The Cause, but I gotta give you props for invoking (in my mind, at least) that too-forgotten Hanks/Akroyd remake of Dragnet and the secret cult known as P.A.G.A.N.

(Ya know - People Against Goodness And Niceness? Headed by Christopher Plummer? And they needed a virgin to sacrifice on the altar so they kidnapped the virgin Connie Swail? Man, that movie slayed me when I was 15.)

But see, I’m even dumber than that. I should’ve have understood that there would be a hidden subtext in all your writings before I even bought the book, because it’s right there on the cover. And incidentally, I think it’s really really cruel not to give readers the real key to enjoying this novel, right at the outset. Okay, I’ll give it to em now. No one should miss out.

See, the outside cover? WAY classy.

But there it is, on the inside cover

The packaging itself is the key to unlocking the hidden meaning of the Lord of Fire! And for those of you who don’t really care for that post-modern jazzing around about literature, it’s just plain ole funny! Like the visual punchline, see. Let me give a practical demonstration of how I read this book, and you’ll understand:

Read page 2: He took another sip of wine, his silvery eyes gleaming with mayhem.

Then flip to the front

Recover from laughter, then read page 48: He pulled back his hood, unveiling a face of burning, satanic, male beauty…. No wonder they called him Lucifer, she thought. He was made for temptation.

Then flip to the front: Him!!

Ow… my side. This novel should come with a warning, I tells ye. I coulda ruptured something. So anyway, somewhere along about the time that the heroine mentions that she dabbles in watercolors and Lucien’s inward response is: An artist. Of course. Those beautiful hands. That penetrating gaze. The seething passion under her cool, demure surface…—and I started, in my exasperated fashion, to write in the margin: “Dude, they’re JUST WATERCOLORS”—that’s when I started to get it.

It’s all a big joke.

You get how bad it is. You MEANT for it to be this bad. You’ve gone beyond the purple, Ms. Foley, and for that - I salute you!

I mean, here so very MANY writers are working so hard and slaving to churn out something of real quality. Something that really SAYS something. And here so many readers are, looking and hoping and wistfully wondering if maybe this Romance novel will be the one to really speak to their hearts about love in a new way. We sit back and fork over our earnings, hope doled out in increments of $6.99 (Canada: $9.99), only to have those hopes dashed time and time again on the hard and jagged rocks of yet another boring motherfucking cliché that I read back when I was thirteen. (Note: performative statement.)

But you’re right, Gaelen. You don’t mind if I call you Gaelen, do you? And you don’t mind if I break the fourth wall here for a second and admit that I’m beating up on you just because your oeuvre had the misfortune to be sitting at the top of a pile of steaming horseshit? (And by horseshit, I mean about a dozen other acclaimed romance novels.)

No? Great, then I’ll just continue, confident that you understand this is nothing personal.

So as I was saying, Gaelen, you’re TOTALLY right. It’s not about good writing or bad writing. Heck - if it was, could you get away with writing about the “teeming wetness” at the “core of her womanhood” and her “nub”? (Gads, I whooped out loud at that one.) And those are among the least offensive examples, of course. I spent a good five minutes staring at the sentence “The silence was almost holy with their love,” and trying to figure out if that was truly meant to be, like, moving or touching or something.

It’s not about writing realistic characters and keeping staying true to those characters. I mean, if it were about that, then the sensible and “not particularly bold” Alice wouldn’t agree to stay in the house of an orgy-throwing manipulator of satanic proportions who outright says he wants her there so he can seduce her—not without excellent motivations, because she has an awful lot to lose. See, that tortured soul of a hero (the dastardly rogue!) forces her to choose which woman
will be his prisoner for a week: will Alice sacrifice herself or will the poor widdle nephew’s debauched and unfeeling and always-absent mama - who’s been screwing Lucien for weeks and loving every hot inch of it - stay with him and get fucked? Alice chooses to ruin herself, the dumbass, and why? Just so that her nephew (WHO HAS THE FUCKIN’ CHICKEN POX, I MEAN YOU COULDA GIVEN HIM A FEVER OR SOMETHING, LOOK HOW SHOUTY I AM!!!) can have his mother-in-name-only at his side, even though this mother is the kinda woman who says to Lord Lucifer (in his “secret headquarters” [oh, and you described it thusly, too! what artistry!] overlooking the orgy) that she’s been “coming her brains out” at his little soirée. Yeah, let’s send her home to tend the poxy toddler. That Alice sure does care.

I also learned that it’s certainly not about an even half-way decent narrative voice. I mean, why on earth should I, the reader, have to do any thinking at all? Why should I have to rely on the author to build sexual tension and emotional intensity? Why should have to wait to see these characters’ deepest emotional needs and scars revealed in the due course of their life-changing relationship, when I could just have it spelled out for me? Repeatedly. As in: “His only hope of saving his soul was to put aside all his powers of seduction and manipulation and to reach out from the deepest , truest--and most vulnerable--part of himself.” Page 200. Not that one should shoot ever one’s wad so indiscreetly, but one certainly shouldn’t do so at like page 200.

And just a note (because I’m a prose whore, sorry) that you may want to keep in mind, as an experiment maybe? See, when you use that many adjectives and adverbs and exclamation points and you consistently point out at least a few times on every page of the novel, that this or that is Important or Intense or Very Very Meaningful—well, it’s a lot like putting big fat red exclamation points on all your Outlook emails. If they’re all urgent, then none of them are, see.

Anyway, I was thinking it was really about the spirited old-skoolness of it all, what with the (literal) grotto of lovin’, the narcolepsy-inducing spy plot (ps: Claude Bardou and Rollo Green? EXCELLENT cheesy spy names!), and the crapulent “only you can heal my wounds” dialogue. Plus, it’s just so totally reminiscent of like a pirate novel - ooh, he’s so bad, he will take her, she doesn’t want to want him but he stirs something in her, he WILL have her! Yadida yadida - great fun, all of it. So I was all into it. But then when you totally blow it (um, no pun intended) on the nookie—well, I won’t say it didn’t confuse me. I mean, it should be sizzling, in the tradition of old-skoolery, non? But it’s not. He doesn’t rip her bodice. She doesn’t resist. Not even a LITTLE bit. And I won’t pretend, Gaelen—I was way wicked bummed out.

But then I remembered your true purpose: this whole novel is a wink and a nod to the savvy reader. Funny lil secret handshake among those of us who get it. And what is it that we get?

This:  There IS such a thing as good and bad. It’s not just a matter of taste. It’s a matter of fact. It’s not my opinion that Lord of Fire and a good 90+% of Romance is utter shite writing, lazy and tired and sloppy and just plain bad--it’s a fact.

Because this is a bad book - crap characters and a crap story and even crap nookie (um, not kinky nookie involving crap, though, you know what I mean). Sure, some people may like it - and like it a LOT, and are sitting at the monitor, working up a healthy bit of indignation at what a rip-roaring little bitch I am - but having defenders doesn’t make it good writing. Good writing is qualitative, and so is bad writing. And there’s just something about this genre (I dunno, maybe because girls are taught to play nice?) that makes it impossible for reviewers to come right out and say: This is BAD WRITING. You might like it and it’s not wrong to like it, and I don’t think less of you or your intelligence for liking it, and bully for the author who can care so little and sell so much. But the bottom line is that It. Is. Not. Good. It’s not even just sorta-okay. It’s downright bad, so Jesus effing CHRIST, can we all stop pretending that it’s simply not my cuppa? Can we all just say that we WANT good writing instead of being nice about the stuff that other people seem to like, and it’s what’s on offer, so okay apparently it’s “all a matter of taste”?

No, apparently we can’t. The closest we can get to it is agreeing on One Really Bad Author coffConnieMasoncoffcoff and deciding it’s okay to laugh at her. (Insert social commentary here, about the momentum of mediocrity and the tyrrany of egalitarianism, how too-threatening it is to have to recognize definitive excellence and definitive dreck because heaven forbid anyone is better than anyone else in this world. Oh and as long as I’m at it, I’ll quote my friend Paul who says that “some stuff is just better. Platonically. God loves it more.")

But we can have you, Ms. Foley, to write a book that is so blatantly bad that it proves the point: there is such a thing as Good. And it’s not this. Some novels are the “it’s so bad, it’s good!” kind—and this is that, to the casual reader. But thankfully, I saw the deeper meaning, which is more like: “it’s so bad that it’s bad.” And it’s sadly got so very many friends on the shelves.

Gratefully Yours,
A Reader and Humble Student

And PS: I just really have to thank you, because I just read page 91 again: He was fierce as a tiger, as quick as an adder, and as wily as a fox… And then I flip to the front:

Genius. G.E.N.I.U.S.

I’ll admit that the first type of conflation makes a lot more sense to me, because most alpha heroes in old-school romances WERE pretty much royal asswads of the first degree. These heroes made wrong assumptions about the heroine’s sexual experience, raped her, then became furious with the heroine for not telling them she was a virgin, then later they might apologize that they assumed she wasn’t a virgin (note: implying that raping a sexually-experienced woman is fine and dandy).

Not all alpha heroes are like that, of course. There are asshole tendencies in many alpha heroes, but the extent to which these latent tendencies emerge varies greatly from author to author and book to book. I like alpha heroes who, by the end of the book, realize they’ve been arrogant shitheads, apologize accordingly and reform enough so that although they’re still confident, they’re not going to go back to acting like a bull with a hornet up his ass. Sebastian of Lord of Scoundrels, Devon of The Windflower, Whatsisface of Lily (yeah, I liked the book mostly because of the heroine) and Ransom of Midsummer Moon had reformed enough and seen where they’d gone wrong that I was confident they weren’t going to keep on mistreating the heroine badly--not that they had crossed too many lines in the sand in the first place, though Devon and Whatsisface came very, very close.

Derek Craven of Dreaming of You is a good example of an alpha hero with few to no asshole tendencies--or would he be considered more of a gamma hero? Ugh, so confusing. Come to think of it, Kleypas consistently writes alpha heroes with few to no jerk tendencies.

But beta heroes = wishy-washy wimps? What the hell? Like I said in the comments: I have yet to encounter a pussywhipped romance novel hero, and I’m a person who actively seeks out books featuring beta heroes. Even nerds get to save the day and make the heroine come until she sees stars in romance novels.

And does anyone else find it disturbing that a lot of people seem to be equating “nice guy” with being a wimp? Because I don’t. I equate a nice guy with, uh, niceness. He won’t cheat on me, he won’t assume horrible things about me, if something’s bugging him he’ll talk to me about it instead of thinking the worst and smacking me around, and best of all, he has a sense of humor and can laugh at himself when he needs to. When I try to boss him around, he usually gives me a Look, then walks away instead of trying to escalate it into a pointless fight. He doesn’t want to change me, nor does he want to “just tame” me, he likes me as I am, flaws and all. In short, nice guys are functional. Dysfunction may be more interesting and exciting because it generates so much turmoil, but that doesn’t mean nice guys are boring. Not always, anyway.

And THAT, really, is the biggest problem with beta heroes, because some romance authors cannot resist the temptation to impart every species of perfection onto their heroes, which ends up with them being kind of bland. A great example of this is the hero from The Naked Duke. He wasn’t a wimp by any stretch of the imagination, but man, he made me snore and then snore some more.

And I’m going to bring up Christy of To Love and To Cherish yet fucking again because man, talk about a beta hero done right. He’s perfect too--as the heroine notes, he even argues without rancor. Yet he’s adorable. He’s the sexy kind of nice that makes you want to tie him up and dirty him up a little. And Anne, the heroine, certainly doesn’t run roughshod over him; they both compromise during the course of their love story--you know, like rational adults often do.

Anyway, to summarize:

I don’t necessarily mind if my heroes are assholes, but if they are, they must be thoroughly repentant assholes by the end of the book.

I really, really like nice guys, both in real life and in my fiction. I have NO IDEA why people immediately equate nice guys with wimps, because all the nice guys I’ve known are plenty assertive--they’re just not dickheads about having their way all the time, every time.

To me, prose becomes purple instead of merely descriptive or lyrical when the author does any of the following:

1. She is a habitual noun- and verb-molester. It’s a sickness. She can’t leave the naked, quivering, defenceless word alone; she must assault it with modifiers, gleefully thrust in multiple adjectives and adverbs, and violate it merrily with superlatives and bad metaphors--not unlike what I’m doing to this paragraph now.

2. The descriptions, while elaborate, are almost always quite painfully mundane. The wind is “cruel and biting,” bare branches are “gnarled, grasping fingers,” the eyes are “sparkling orbs,” old women are “withered crones,” words are not spoken, they’re “rasped passionately.” Nothing new is offered; you’re drowned in a sea of descriptions that have been used so often, they’re well-nigh meaningless.

3. When the prose isn’t mundane, it’s jarring. The phrase “alabaster mounds,” when used to describe breasts, often makes me think of large lumps of cold, dead marble; probably not the effect the author wanted to achieve. And I won’t even tell you what I think when I read words like “slick love grotto” or “passion-bedewed portal,” though the phrase “gag me” does feature prominently in these thoughts.

4. To these authors, more = mo’ betta. The old maxim to make every word count holds no meaning to them, neither does the concept that over-described objects can interfere every bit as much with a reader’s visualization as under-described objects.

Take, for instance, this passage from the beginning of Laura Kinsale’s The Prince of Midnight. In this passage, S.T. first realizes that Leigh, the heroine, is actually a woman dressed as a boy:

He was certain of it. Abruptly and utterly certain. The soft, husky voice that didn’t rise and fall in ordinary tones, but stayed stubbornly gruff; that skin, those lips, the slender build--oh, she was a female, the sly little cat. She had the face to carry it off, too, clean and striking, marvelous, with a full jaw and dramatic brows, and enough height and carriage to pass for a youth of sixteen.

In my opinion, descriptive, but not purple. Now witness what adding and/or changing some modifiers can do to the passage:

He was certain of it. Abruptly and utterly certain. The soft, husky voice that didn’t rise and fall in ordinary tones, but stayed stubbornly gruff and raspy; that creamy skin, those beestung, lush lips, the slender build with the deliciously rounded bottom that was far, far too luscious to be male--oh, she was a female, the sly little creamcat. She had the face to carry it off, too, clean and striking, marvelous, with a full jaw and dramatic, winged brows that soared on her smooth alabaster forehead like angels in flight, and enough height and carriage to pass for a devastatingly beautiful youth of sixteen, a youth worthy of being sculpted by no less a master than Michelangelo.

One paragraph of this sort of writing is one thing, but a whole bookful of it? GAH.

I’m not going to be all PC and say that “there’s no such thing as bad or good, it’s all personal preference.” OK, it’s somewhat personal in that the purple line in the sand is located differently for different people. But once that line is crossed? Purple prose is bad writing. Bad, bad, bad.

I also don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with liking it. Shit, I like Doritos, and it’s certainly not haut cuisine, nor do they have any sort of redeeming nutritional value. I even acknowledge that they look, smell and taste kind of disgusting (especially the Cool Ranch flavor), but I don’t care, I love ‘em anyway.

Same thing with purple authors. When I’m in the right mood and when the author gets the shade of lilac just right, I enjoy reading purple prose, much in the same way I enjoy a really silly blockbuster in which the most taxing thing I have to do is trying to decide if Keanu’s semi-pained frown is indicative of his character’s inner turmoil, or whether he needs to up his Metamucil dosage.

More often than not, though, I can’t stand purple prose. It drives me nuts; the inner editor in me longs to drag out the red pen and slash out all the unnecessary modifiers. With lascivious, wanton abandon, even.

Sarah’s Part of the Rant:

My purple prose master, the author to whom I kneel when I search for the overwrought, overwritten, and overblown, is Beatrice Small. In fact, while going through books to keep or to donate this weekend, I pulled out the sequel to “Blaze Wyndham,” which is hands-down my favorite purple book, which follows the saga of Blaze’s daughter Nyssa. I put it in the ‘Keeper’ pile, as I don’t own a copy of Blaze Wyndham so Nyssa will have to do until I find one.

Hubby asked, “Why are you keeping that book?”
Sarah: “Because it is the most purple book I own.”
Hubby: “Purple?”
Sarah: “Yeah. Purple. The prose.”
Hubby: “Huh?”
Sarah: “Stay right there.” Flips to page where Nyssa has sex. (Of COURSE Nyssa has some sex! What would a purple be without some nookie?)
Sarah: “Ahem: ‘He deposited his love juices into her moist canal.’”
Hubby: “WHAT?! You can’t throw that book away! You have to keep that!”

Phrases like that define the purplest of the purple. To back Candy up, oh yes, nothing turns a book to grape flavoring like overworked words: “huskily” is my personal trigger, along with “redolent.” For some reason, I see “redolent” and my brain reads “corpulent.” Not at all what the author was intending, I imagine.

For example, I have now in front of me said saga of Nyssa and her love juices. Here are some purply examples for your titillating pleasure:

“Your love juices begin to flow, sweetheart,” he said softly, kissing her ear as he spoke. “That is how I know you are ready for me.” The tip of his finger found her tiny love button and he rubbed it....

She cried his name even as the feeling of pressure building within her exploded in a starbust of incredible pleasure… He could feel his love juices gushing forth in a great discharge of sweetness that overflowed her womb. He fell forward atop her body, exhausted, yet filled with a contentment he had never known.

Ah, the golden standards of purpleism: love juices, love button, and, further into the sexcapades of Nyssa in “Love, Remember Me,” we find his raging member.

What bothers me most is that purple prose does little to advance the story or even distinguish it from others of its ilk. I picture the author trying to come up with a masterful adverb or a devastating adjective, and unwittingly using the standby seen in hundreds of other works, even as the author tries to deviate from the pack. It’s sad - it’s like talking to someone who doesn’t express a thought originally, but couches everything in cliche so you feel like you’re not really talking to anyone. Not anyone intelligent, anyway.

It didn’t start out this way. When I first started reading romance novels—and I mean actively seeking them out, instead of turning to my sister’s collection of old-skool romances out of desperation when my book-buying budget ran out—everything was fresh and new. Extremely naïve debs from days gone by I didn’t have a problem with. Girls were a lot more sheltered back then. Eventually, however, I noticed an odd, rather disturbing pattern emerging in almost all the romance novels I encountered, regardless of the period setting: all the women were virgins. If they weren’t virgins, their previous love lives had been unequivocally horrible. You name it: childhood sexual torture, rape, abusive ex-husbands, impotent ex-husbands, lousy boyfriends who couldn’t find a clitoris with a flashlight, a magnifying glass and a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs—the heroines weren’t allowed to come or even so much as cream their panties watching the hot stableboy muck out the stalls before the heroes showed up with their magical Fleshy Sword of Pleasure +10. If the heroines weren’t virgins and had experienced orgasms in the past, it was only because the heroes had generously bestowed them, but once the heroes leave, the poor heroines are left in a holding pattern. Do not pass go, do not find another orgasm, do not collect $200.

(On a related note: I am also bloody sick of traumatic de-flowerings. I am tired of how the heroines go from “bring the morphine drip STAT” agony to eye-rolling ecstasy in 60 seconds. I’m not asking for strict realism in my romance novels, but please, some variety would be nice. Not everyone’s first time involves pain, not all girls have intact hymens, and reading about a virgin heroine whose first time is beyond stellar is much more believable if penetration was merely uncomfortable instead of a sea of stabbing, searing, tearing pain.)

Many romance novel authors seem to turn themselves inside out and stretch all credulity to create physically untouched heroines whose counterparts are, more often than not, immensely slutty men who slide their dicks into anything remotely moist and warm. Not only that, but if there are female villains, they are usually sexually voracious creatures. What does that say about the state of the sexual double-standard, eh? The authors probably don’t mean to reinforce the old Madonna/Whore dichotomy or imply that women who enjoy sex for its own sake are all morally corrupt, but that’s the collective message one could easily come away with after reading a few hundred romance novels. This message is hammered home hardest in the contemporaries featuring the heroine who doesn’t take another lover (or only one or two phenomenally lousy ones) after breaking up with the hero. One Pamela Burford Harlequin Temptation I read some years ago literally got flung against the wall when the divorced heroine admitted she hadn’t slept with anyone else after divorcing the hero, while the hero had had no trouble getting laid.

In short, many romance novels do not allow women to be independent sexual entities, while the men definitely are, and the unfairness is provoking, to say the least. I understand the appeal of an “untouched” heroine, one whose world is only really and truly rocked when the hero comes along. I dig that fantasy. But isn’t part of the fantasy also how the hero’s world is only really and truly rocked when the heroine comes along? So how do romance novel authors achieve this without glutting the market with virgin heroes and legions of heroes whose ex-wives all suffered from vaginismus?

By utilizing the emotional component, of course, and by making the sex that much more explosive because of the heightened emotions. Oftentimes the physical chemistry is portrayed as being out-of-control hot, so hot that the sexually experienced hero is often at a loss. So why don’t more romance authors utilize this method on heroines too, especially in contemporary novels or historical romances with sexually-experienced heroines? I don’t know. Possible reasons probably include laziness, adherence to tradition (whether conscious or unconscious) and the belief that it’s OK for a guy to be the hugest whore in the world but that it’s icky for a girl to have had multiple sexual partners and, God forbid, actually ENJOYED the experience.

However, in the hands of a skilled author, it’s possible to make annoying archetypes like the Orgasmless Widow into believable, sympathetic characters; Loretta Chase, for one, did it twice in Mr. Impossible and Captives of the Night. What makes her Orgasmless Widows interesting, however, is how both of them enjoyed the sex but were left unfulfilled, only to have their husbands make what enjoyment they had seem wrong and shameful. This is a much more nuanced take than the army of sexually sadistic and/or impotent hubbies usually inflicted on the average Orgasmless Widow.

I’m not saying I dislike these romance novel conventions enough that I’m going to make a buying decision based on the state of the heroine’s purity. I do reserve the right to relentlessly make fun of these archetypes when I encounter them, and if they’re done poorly, they’re definitely grounds for docking the final grade a point or three. In fact, now that I think about it, I want to propose a standardized scale for rating how good a job authors do when portraying the heroine’s sexual (in)experience. I’m going to call it the “Bitch, Please!” scale, with the unit of measurement being a BP (yes, it’s metric—an extremely exasperating justification for a heroine’s virginity may rate a kiloBP, for example). It’s based on how often the book makes me say out loud or think emphatically “Bitch, please!” when the author explains why Priscindella Prissypants has been married for six years yet doesn’t even know where her vagina is located, much less what to do with her clitoris. For instance, Amanda of The Real Deal gets at least 50 BPs for her unduly stankeriffic bisexual husband and her beyond-rotten childhood, while Holly of Where Dreams Begin rates only 8 or so BPs.

So, think the BIPM will be adding BPs to the International System of Units any time soon?