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

A little while ago, Bookslut ran a very entertaining feature on children’s book covers featuring wizards, complete with various makeovers. I figured we here at Smart Bitch Central could shamelessly rip off this idea pay homage to this idea and talk about some of the classics of our genre and how their covers have evolved. First up on the chopping block: that doyenne of hearts and savages and thunder and savagely thundering hearts, Johanna Lindsey. For extra bonus funtimes, swap around the titles and covers. Hell, swap around the individual words! They’re astonishingly interchangeable. Brave the Wild Rogue! A Heart so Savage! Gentle Thunder!

Savage Thunder

This cover, perhaps more than any other, is THE classic Lindsey cover. It has that red-haired chick in a mildly creepy supplicant pose, suggesting that Humjobs Are Imminent--or maybe that crotches will be bashed with fatal force against foreheads. Difficult to tell sometimes. It has some kind of random animal freaking the fuck out in the background. And it has Fabio. Wearing Uggs. With hair dyed black--presumably because that makes him look Indian--and flowing in the wind, except in this case, the wind seems to be coming from below and directly behind him. A thundering savage, indeed. I read this book when I was seventeen years old, and to be honest, I can’t remember a goddamn thing about it other than the sex-on-a-horse scene (she wakes up! On horseback! And she’s coming like a rocket! And then they have crazy screaming balls-out sex on a galloping horsie!) and the cover. Hey, I was a horny teenager. What the hell do you expect me to find most memorable about a Johanna Lindsey novel?

And the re-make? Let’s take a look, shall we?

What the hell? From Little Blowjob on the Prairie to Little House on the Prairie. Surreal. Also, deeply deceptive of its contents. Much as the previous cover makes me cringe, it at least accurately conveyed what you found within. That cover smacks you on the face and proudly proclaims “Feisty redhead heroine alert! You’ll probably want to smack the shit out of her before the book is over! Lots of sweaty, dirty, OMGHOT sex! Indian dude with massive chip on his shoulder! There will be lots of yelling, both when they argue and when they screw like horny, horny weasels!”

The new cover says, rather sedately, “I am a family saga. There are two sisters. And lots of descriptions of the brutal winters. One of them marries a preacher who turns out to be an alcoholic. The other one--the plain one--injures her leg, loses her faith in God, and finds her faith again when she adopts a starving urchin.”

This cover’s much less embarrassing to cart around, but I gotta say, I kinda prefer the old one.

A Heart So Wild

Ahhh, the When Vampire Cowboys Go Gay cover. So much love. So much gauntness.  So much inexplicable posturing--I mean, tango is sexy and all, but why in the fuck are they practicing right by a roaring campfire? One of the classic conundrums of our time.

We go from that bit of pulp camp to:

Ah, yes. I remember this phase of Johanna Lindsey covers. For a while, all her reissues had these huge, lurid flowers on them, and then they were plain with the occasional paint splatter in the background--I like to think of them as the half-assed Jackson Pollock phase of Lindsey covers. They were by and large inoffensive, but also boring as hell, though if I remember correctly, these often had mantitty-licious stepbacks. If I had to choose, I’d say this one makes me less embarrassed to cart around in public, but this isn’t by any means a good cover.

Brave the Wild Wind

If there’s one thing you can learn from this cover, it’s that you can stick two hot, mostly-naked people in a raging torrent of radioactive goo, and it STILL won’t make it sexy. Years from now, the woman’s going to be popping out two-headed kittens and children with their organs on the outside of their bodies, and she’ll be sobbing with regret into her oatmeal. Why did she take that modelling job in college? Why? Whyyyyy?

We go from that piece of strangeness to:

Holy bloated pink horsies, Batman! That horse is straight from a “Where Are They Now” special on My Little Pony. After the Saturday Morning cartoon series, after the insane merchandising, after the mobs of adoring girls, obscurity hit Chocolate Stallion hard. He developed a nasty coke habit, was forced to get a bleach job, and started posing on romance novel covers. How the mighty have fallen.

This re-issue manages to be both more discreet AND more hilarious than the old one. That takes talent.

Gentle Rogue

The cover change for this book is perhaps one of the most whiplash-inducing re-work of all time. But as with all things, you can basically categorize it using a LOLCat dichotomy.

That up there? Visible Buttsecks.

The new cover?

Invisible Buttsecks.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for next week, when we take on Catherine Coulter. Try not to pee yourself with anticipation.

A few weeks ago, we brought you Cover Makeovers, the Johanna Lindsey edition, wherein a team of five flamingly homosexual cover art specialists are hand-picked to overhaul the...wait, CRAP, the expiration date on that joke was 2004. At any rate, in our first edition of Cover Makeovers, we looked at the evolution of the pièces d’art gracing the masterworks of that Doyenne of Bodice Rippery, Johanna Lindsey. Up on this week’s chopping block: that Beldame of Heaving Bosoms, Catherine Coulter.

Let’s play Spot the Theme with the older covers, shall we? Let’s look at these covers, especially the first two, and ponder what similarities there may be. I wonder what they could be? Hmmmm.

Look at the hair! And that eyeshadow! FIERCE! But really, it’s the little touches that make these covers magical. Take the swan in cover numéro deux, for example. Is it:

a) Zeus in disguise, being a pervy voyeur and enjoying a little vicarious what-what-in-the-butt;

b) an innocent bird flushed (hur hur hur) out of its comfortable nest because all these scantily-dressed people with terrible eye makeup and enough hairspray to ignite all of Sudan insist on having buttsecks right on top of it;

c) a visually punny indicator of the fowl (HUR HUR HUR) perversions afoot; or

d) a metaphor for the hero’s long, skinny penis?

I’d vote for (c), but in all honesty, (b) is the most likely answer.

(I wonder if ornithologists noticed any disruptions in swan nesting patterns in the late 70s and early 80s? Because there were a lot of swans on these goddamn covers. I mean a lot.)

The cover re-makes, while a great deal more tasteful, are also a great deal more boring. Look at them:

These covers probably paint all the walls of their houses colors like “eggshell cream” and would clutch at their pearls in shock at the very idea of non-consensual sex involving the hero jamming cream up the reluctant heroine’s hoo-hoo as both foreplay and lubricant. ‘Tis a sad fact but true: the older covers, while hilariously bad, at least provided a modicum of truth in advertising.

Up next on the chopping block: Loretta Chase, whose Indian name could easily be Eternally Cursed with Covers Featuring Greasy Men With Dodgy Hair. Stay tuned!

I haven’t done a Cover Makeover in a good long time, and I figured you guys are long past due for another eye-searing collection of past and present cover hilarity. This current set’s victims are the novels of Loretta Chase. In case you didn’t know already, I love Loretta Chase novels like whoa and like burning. She writes intelligent, elegantly-constructed stories that tweak romance novel conventions in exactly the right ways, all narrated in a delightfully wry voice.

You wouldn’t know it looking at the covers. You look at the covers, and you can hear the soft porn sax begin to flow, and girls with names like Tami or Koral exclaiming their pleasure in breathy voices even as they attempt to writhe around the bed in a way that won’t rub the fake tanner off on the sheets.

So given that these books are actually GOOD, when Berkley re-released her two earliest Avon historicals, I was all YES! AWESOME! Finally, she can get the covers she deserves!

Nope. No such luck. I don’t know how or why Chase has pissed off the God of Good covers so severely, but almost every cover she’s had has been beaten severely with the ugly stick before being run over--twice--by the ugly truck.

I know I promised Jude Deveraux for this week’s cover makeovers, but holy shitmonkeys, y’all, I was cleaning out my hard drive and found covers for Catherine Coulter’s Night trilogy, and I couldn’t resist. The Montgomery Twins and Velvety Love Sauce will just have to wait until later.