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

Stafford also pays attention to the personal touch of shopping online:

The Internet can be an anonymous place with none of the warmth of walking into your neighborhood store. But small-business people have found ways to genuinely interact with their customers online. Unlike most online retailers, from whom customers get automated E-mail confirmations that their orders have been shipped, Stafford says he writes personal messages for each order to let the customer know that he’s really looking at it. “The kind of thanks that I get is really the telltale,” he says. “Everything I send out gets some sort of thank you.”

I haven’t shopped from Lughnassadh personally, but if you’re looking for the rare or antique category romance, Stafford’s online store might be a good place to start. Curious about the name? I was, and on the “About Us” I found:

I get a lot of questions about our name. LughnassadhBooks.com is named for the Druid harvest festival lughnassadh (pronounced loo-nah-sahd). The festival also honors the Celtic god Lugh, who presides over the harvest and knowledge — you could say he was the Druidic god of the farmers and the teachers. Since I grew up on a farm and I’ve always loved books, it fits me and my business perfectly. LughnassadhBooks.com is devoted to preserving the written word and cultivating the love of knowledge.

Cool. 

“What I really need is to get laid to calm the werewolf.”

Thanks for explaining that one, sir! How about another bit of awkward monologue to kick the story forward three paces? Please?

The greatest flaw that tripped me up as a reader - to the point where some of it was just comedy gold - was the dialogue, especially of the dialogue that Dean carries on with himself when he’s alone. Some of it is trite and not much like anything a human would say, shifter or otherwise. And sometimes the narration addresses the reader directly; other times it exists solidly between Sunday and Dean. Details and explanations are repeated, like the definition of “were” as part of “werewolf,” and there’s a lot of Dean thinking to himself, talking to himself, or otherwise remarking on matters at hand out loud when he’s alone.

The very cool part: when they start comparing notes on the differences in their shifting natures, and how different his experience is from hers. Their honesty is what brings them together in a short amount of time, trapped in a very small amount of space, but unlike contrived erotic situations where sex happens for really lame and flimsy reasons, the attraction between Sunday and Dean is built on both their human attractiveness, their animal senses, such as scent, and the revelations they share with each other regarding both of their hidden and dangerous identities. It is not an easy task to bring two people together under a time and space constraint such as those present in category romances. It’s even harder, I’d think, in a category short story. Hauf does an admirable job both building the tension, and building the connection between them at the same time - better, in fact, than some full-length novels I’ve read where one character Must Have Sex lest Bad Things Happen.

The first sex scene, as a result of Hauf’s deliberate effort to craft tension and attraction between them, is surprisingly risky and I’m impressed with the boundaries pushed in the very electric depiction. However, a subsequent sex scene contains the most unintentionally hilarious description of coitus I’ve read in a long time: (highlight to read) “Flesh to flesh, the rasp of her nipples grazing his skin alternated with the giddy hug of her around his erection.” Her vagina was all, like, ‘Wheeee! Hugs for you?!’ AWESOME. 

Hauf uses innovative means to sustain the sexual tension even after they’ve started spinning his lugnuts, delaying half of the pleasure and lengthening the eroticism for both the reader and the protagonists. There’s climax after climax, literally and narratively, and while the set up was a bit slow, like the oppressive air before a soaking storm, once Dean and Sunday get down to business in the flatbed of his truck (Yeah, baby!) I raced for the finish line of the story as fast as my thumb could hit the space bar. (That’s not a euphemism.)

The conclusion returns to the over-explaining dialogue to sum up how their relationship will work, sexually and emotionally, but still, I have to say, the entire interlude was satisfying. I read the whole story over my lunch hour, which was even more satisfying indeed. I can read a category in an evening, but an entire romance over lunch? Boo yah.

Wanna sample some biting short story romance action? The Nocturne: Bites line launches today, and I have five, count ‘em five coupon codes to give away. Just leave a comment, any comment, and I’ll use a random integer generator this evening to pick five happy users who will go off and enjoy their own bite of romance.

Speaking of, here’s a rare bit of story from my world. Last weekend I went to a dinner party celebrating my cousin’s marriage to a nice bloke from England, and as part of the party favor, my aunt placed “Brit-speak” cards at every place setting. My card? You guessed it: “Bollocks.” I was SO pleased.

Bonus: see the making-of behind the scenes video as well, for additional blokes and giggles:

Sarah: There were some gawdawful covers last year. I can think of a few that turned my stomach to an even deeper yogic twist than some of these, but I have to say, as a slate of terrible, this slate is pretty good. Not great - there were plenty that were much, much worse - but on the whole, not bad for badness. I didn’t upload every single one, since some of them weren’t really poor enough to be among the worst. So here’s our slate.

Candy: I’ve seen worse, to be honest, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand: it really does seem like publishers are finally learning and moving away from the fug. Some of the Worst Cover nominees from 2006 and 2005, for example, I actually liked--but then I dig the comic book look and don’t find comics embarrassing the way some of the commentators apparently do. On the other hand: I derive a certain measure of delicious masochistic pain from the terrible covers, and lots of belly laughs from the ensuing commentary in the contest. Less fug = less fun. The genre wins, but my selfish side wants the cheap laugh, goddammit.

That said: There are still quite a few gems from this particular batch.

Also: when you’re done looking at the snark, head over to Cover Cafe and cast your vote.

Candy: So THIS is what it looks like when Cousin Itt gets a trim and tries to fuck a tribble! Hawt!

Sarah: Nothing says “oh yeah” like necking in the fiery depths of the earth’s core while feeling your skin slowly melt from your body. Hawt indeed!

Candy: Great. You know Cinemax is starting to run low on ideas when they start resorting to “When PR Interns Go Wild” for the late night softcore offerings.

Sarah: The car! The car is tilting at a not-even-closer-to-horizontal dizzying angle and they’re about to roll off the cliff into a fiery oblivion! Wait, apparently they’ve identified the problem and are going out with a bang. You’d think they’d hurry up and get themselves horizontal already.

Candy: Holy shit! My first thought: Post-op tranny love. And goddamn, that sister wasn’t shy about specifying exactly how big she wanted her bazooms to be.

Sarah: We’re moments away from knowing all there is to know about The Crying Game, with bonus DVD features, like this instructional shot that demonstrates how to grab one’s falsie like Wilson Phillips and hold on.

Candy: We’ve snarked this cover in the past, and I want to reiterate: Come on, Kensington. FOR SHAME. If you advertise big, spankable asses, we want big, spankable asses. We want thunderclap-worthy asses. (Warning: video mildly not-work-safe.) That ass? Not even worthy of a static shock.

Sarah: Not big. Not spankable. Not even close. And if the problem is with the title and not so much the cover image, then I expect “Baby of Shame” to make next year’s slate. 

Candy: Oh my God. Between the contrast of the unnaturally perky, clean-cut blonde chick being groped by Gomez Addams’ creepy younger brother (I get the impression he sells used Kias for a living) and the looming house in the background, it’s like Amityville Horror meets the Osmonds.

Make the screaming in my head stop, mommy. Please?

Sarah: Apparently, after the wedding, someone went on a meth bender while operating Photoshop without a license, and this was the result. A bonafide disaster.

Candy: You know, other than the fact that that’s way more skin than I want on the front cover of my book, there’s nothing too horribly wrong with this cover. It’s soft-focus softcore cheesy, and I can practically hear the smooth jazz playing in the background and breathy moans as I look at this, but compared to the other covers, my sensibilities haven’t been ripped out, ripped into shreds, danced upon with three-inch stiletto heels and set on fire.

Sarah: Nothing says, “This book has sex in it” like two people on the cover having sex. Thank you to this book for making it that much more difficult for me to defend accusations that romance = porn.

Especially with the jizztastic explosion of water going on behind her, there. If he orgasms that forcefully in real life, well, no wonder he has to hold onto her by the longhairs. She probably doesn’t have any short ones.

Candy: Touch of Madness? Well, yes, I believe necrophilia is typically a sign of SOME sort of pathology--especially when you start going for the ones who are starting to rot.

Sarah: I can hear the book trailer now: He’s creepy and he’s cooked -EEE!. She’s zombified and ookey. This sure don’t look like nookie. Clamp and Adams, scaring me.

On one hand, it’s difficult to ask the right question. Would the presence of an interracial couple stop someone from buying a romance? (Would it stop me? Nope.) Is interracial romance solely the domain - and by domain I mean “located in the bookshop section” - of Black romance, because the minute one half of a protagonist pair is Black, the book moves toward Black Romance as a subgenre marker? Speaking solely for myself, I’m curious why interracial romance appears to be mostly found in epubs, small presses, erotica, or within Black romance publishing lines. Brenda Jackson has written several for Silhouette Desire, but those seem to be an exception among the backlist of series romance - and yet another reason how the dismissed-as-staid category romances can sometimes not just push but shred the envelope of boundaries every now and again like nothing else.

I’m also curious whether it’s a target people shop for, a type of storyline that some really enjoy the same way I am a total and complete sucker for a certain plotlines, including one that is too embarrassing to mention. If people shop deliberately for interracial romances, then why aren’t there more of them in mainstream romance (unless they’re there and my Google-fu has failed me)? Is there a difficult barrier towards publication of a romance that takes place across cultural and racial lines?  And what counts as interracial, anyway? Does a Black woman and a Middle Eastern man count as interracial? (This reader thinks so.) Or is “interracial” code for solely white/black combinations? Hell, depending on what anti-Semite you ask, my marriage would be interracial.

Mostly I’m wondering simply why there aren’t more interracial couples in romance. There’s more than a few powerhouse examples in mainstream romance across several genres, so I am curious why there’s not more of it. For example, Ward’s Brotherhood plays with race, and the question’s been asked of her point blank whether the Brothers are Black (her answer was that they are not an identifiable human race so it’s impossible to say). Kleypas’ Mine Till Midnight also crossed a racial line in the historical sense, in that her hero was Rom and the heroine was white - a combination that caused me to question the endurance of their happy ending, given the social prejudice working against them. And someone will hunt me down and kick me in the knees if I don’t mention the multi-book subplot of Brockmann’s Sam & Alyssa. All three examples were holy crapping damn successful. Perhaps the problem is that what I perceive of as “few” needs to be adjusted. Someone else might think that’s plenty.

I’m not so much asking for a list of interracial romances, though feel free to suggest some that you’ve enjoyed, but more of a “Interracial romance: what’s up with that? How come there’s not more of it?” type of random musing. So? Your thought? Ha. I crack me up. I know you have more than one.

Some of the people sniping at Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as being equivalent to Harry Potter for angsty teenyboppers except not particularly well-written made me stop and go: “Wait, Harry Potter was well-written?” (This is clearly because I am such a superior reader with superior tastes in all my literature, and anyone who thinks Harry Potter is awesome is wrong. And stupid. And racist. And a killer of puppies. Just so we’re clear about where I come from when I make statements of aesthetic judgment.) My pointless and incredibly silly snobbery when it comes to children’s and YA fiction aside, what struck me about some of the comments in Pharyngula that dealt with Twilight was the offhand dismissal of the series, not merely because they weren’t especially well-written (I myself couldn’t finish Twilight, and in that regard I’m totally in agreement that it’s the Harry Potter of vampire teenyboppers), but because they were obviously written for a teenage female audience in mind. There’s much casual contempt for literature that deals with the emotional and the female, and I see it as a logical extension from a culture that devalues female experiences in general; that teenage female romantic experiences in particular are singled out as being especially frivolous and assumed to be Not Worthy of Serious Thought isn’t anything new, but it still chafes at me when I see it pop up.

I am also fascinated--FASCINATED--that Harlequin has become shorthand for romance, all romance, the way it has, since books published under the Harlequin/Silhouette imprint cover only a very specific niche of romance. It’d be as if, in attempting to define ice-cream, somebody didn’t address the ingredients, or the characteristics that make ice-cream, well, icy and creamy, but instead chose to refer to it solely by a rather slapdash association of flavor and brand name, sometimes resulting in rather jarring juxtapositions if you know ice-cream well. “My mom’s a huge fan of Breyer’s Phish Food, but I just don’t get it--the thought of eating bits of unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough in ice-cream makes me want to hurl,” sez somebody, and it’s all I can do to not leap up like an obnoxious bastard and say “DUDE, Phish Food is Ben and Jerry’s, and for the love of God, it doesn’t have chocolate chip cookie dough anywhere in it, and really, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T EAT ICE-CREAM AND THEREFORE ARE UNQUALIFIED TO COMMENT ON WHAT WE’RE EATING, AND I’M GOING TO JUMP ON YOUR HEAD BECAUSE YOUR NEXT COMMENT IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE HOW EVERYONE WHO EATS ICE-CREAM IS A FAT WHORE. SEE HOW I’M JUMPING ON YOUR HEAD? JUMP. JUMMMMMP.”

Right. Now that I’m thoroughly craving Phish Food (AND have successfully squelched my desire to act like an obnoxious bastard on somebody else’s comment board--at least this time): PZ’s question at the end intrigues me. Where DID this surge come from?Because people attributing the surge to Twilight are wrong. Twilight hit just as vampires and paranormal romance were huge and getting even bigger. JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood had hit the scene like a hundred-khilitohn bhomb the September previous to Twilight‘s publication. I’m not necessarily interested in tracing the whole trajectory to its source, because I think the current paranormal romance scene is not a direct reaction to, say, the disturbing eroticism of Dracula--I think Anne Rice’s novels are a better candidate for that.

Personally, I think the current paranormal romance boom is the direct descendant of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is more urban fantasy than a creature driven by older, more Victorian mythologies and sensibilities.

Regardless of what the Anita Blake series has become, and regardless what people may think, the popularity of the books and its unholy progeny is due to more than the thrill of reading taboo-busting inter-species nookie; somebody in the comments quoted a Powell’s Books employee defining the genre as “women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it’s not a normal human man"--which made me go HAAAA, but also made me go “Oh, come ON, judging all of paranormal romance just because you were forced to page through the Merry Gentry series is hardly fair. I mean, taboo-busting inter-species nookie is pretty hot and definitely a factor in the popularity--and really, God bless our prurient motivations, because so much brilliant art would have gone (and continue to go) unexpressed if it weren’t for horny artists sublimating their unspeakable urges in beautiful ways, and I really don’t see any inherent wrongness in reading something to get your rocks off (but oh God that’s another topic for another time). But slapping the “It’s the Sex, Stupid” label on the phenomenon is too simple, and falls into the old “Psh, it’s porn, that’s why they like it” dismissal that covers everything and explains very little.

My theory is: it’s also about women, and putting women in control, and how we’re still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet.

The surge of demand for women in a dominant role--as pursuers and protectors and warriors--has been a long time coming, and I think it says something interesting about us and our level of comfort with and/or inability to suspend disbelief about women owning a certain sort of cultural power that most of the asskicking happens in Not Quite Earth, and that many of the heroines are Not Quite Human. The current crop of paranormal romances owe a lot to Anita Blake, but they owe much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.

And now I’ve pretty much reached the extent of my over-thinking about this particular bit of romance, it’s your turn: feel free to overthink paranormal romances in the comments. Or, you know, don’t. Do you read it mostly--even solely--for the hot sex and because you have a hard-on for angsty immortals? Sing it loud, and sing it proud.