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

Candy asked for dissent and commentary, and one of the requests, made by more than a few people, was for a link to comments that would display the newest comments first, as opposed to having to scrooooooll down to the bottom to see the most recent comments.

So, behold. You see below each entry a “comments” link, which displays oldest to newest as you scroll down, and a “new comments first” link, which displays new comments at the top of each window.

Enjoy! 

From Kate Rothwell’s blog cometh this very interesting tidbit concerning Medallion Press’ status as an RWA-approved publisher:

From Wendy Burbank of Medallion with permission to forward: “Medallion Press has received a letter from the Executive Director of RWA stating that our status as a publisher was revoked in error.”

Man, I’m just sooo freakin’ curious about what went on over here. For a while there it sounded as if Medallion had kinda dropped the ball, but now… Huh.

Dude tries to stop some young thugs from beating up a sweet young thang on the tube. Dude gets the crap kicked out of him. Dude falls into a coma. Dude enters into an incredibly self-conscious reverie as he attempts to wake himself up from said coma.

And there we have the entirety of Alex Garland’s The Coma. Not all stories with simple plots are brief or insubstantial, but both are true for this book. And when I say brief, I mean brief. It’s only 208 pages, it’s a smaller-than-average hardcover book, every chapter starts with a woodcut illustration, and the font is big. If you’re a book size queen, you’ll barely notice this tiny tome.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It’s just that, as a whole, the story was obvious and, well, kind of juvenile. If a precocious high-school kid had been given a writing assignment about the nature of consciousness, she might’ve come up with something like this.

The concept itself is pretty damn cool, but if you were made to suffer through Descartes or Waking Life at some point in college, this book covers much of the same ground. What is being? What is reality? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of perception? Unfortunately, this book doesn’t offer anything new, insightful or particularly interesting.

A few of aspects of the book manage to save the story from being utter drek. The surreal yet concrete nature of the coma patient’s experiences mimic the dreaming state quite credibly. Three scenes in particular—one in the narrator’s bathroom, in which he discovers he’s bleeding, one in a music shop and one in a bookstore—are truly excellent. These scenes, however, are fleeting, and the deeper ramifications are left unexplored.

Garland’s prose style, as always, is gorgeous. If sacrificing shaved gerbils at the altar of the ancient Sumerian god Manititti would help me write sentences as clean and beautiful Garland’s, my house would be well-stocked with really tiny razorblades.

(Don’t worry, the gerbils are safe. I’m content to envy Garland from afar.)

The woodcut illustrations for the story, courtesy of Garland’s father, Nicholas Garland, are also gorgeous. On one hand, they add a certain oomph to the book. On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling that they were used to pad the pagecount.

After the wonderful stories Garland offered in The Beach (get the British version, the American version seemed to be modified quite heavily), The Tesseract and 28 Days Later, The Coma hath broken my fangirlish heart.

OK, not broken. But it’s dinged quite severely.

Evil Auntie Peril, who cracks me up, wrote in the following: There is the historical association: male long hair = virility. From Samson to those wacky Merovingian reges criniti ("Cut my head off, but no, don’t take the hair!!!") to Fabio, the legend continues. Which begs the question, do flowing locks counteract the girly aspects of man-titty, or enhance it? Or are they subliminally evoking the unbridled passion one is guaranteed to find beneath these covers?

As for those of us with a fancy for the follically-challenged, I think Suzanne Brockman once wrote a hero with a receding hairline, but he never made it onto the cover (sniff). .

So true, the manly hair being a sign of virility. I agree that it is odd that the women on romance novel covers often have long, long, LONG hair and it is possible that they are subliminally echoing the virility of the man with their unbridled manes of peculiarly-colored hair.

But EAP’s comment at the bottom, about Suzanne Brockman’s hero with a receeding hairline made me ponder: how much does it matter to women today whether a man has a receeding hairline? Does it bother any of us? I think this might be the secret equal to women’s obsession with weight. We all worry (well, many of us do!) about our weight and whether the men in our lives notice our cellulite, our saddlebags, our muffin tops.

I’ve had a few conversations with male friends - who are profoundly unwilling to discuss their hairlines until prodded with the stubborn force of Sarah’s Will - wherein they’ve told me it is their biggest personal fear, that they will lose their hair. One friend of mine told me that her husband, who is a tall, muscular, kind, and incredibly talented carpenter, looked at her with a panicked expression when he realized he’d lost some hair and asked her seriously, “Are you going to leave me?”

While this has nothing to do with romance novels, it does touch on romance, attraction, and images of virility - which we here at SBTB like to skewer at least once a week! So - what’s your opinion: if a man loses his hair, is he out to pasture or is can he still be a hotty mc hot hot? Are we all holding on to the idea of a man with thick, luscious hair as the ultimate sign of handsomeness (and don’t forget those mantitties!) or is it ok for a romance hero, or a hero in our real life romances, to have a slighty-less-than-full head of hair?

As we’ve noted many a time in our cover-cranky series, romance covers are being redesigned into solid colored paperbacks with a “belt” of illustration in the middle, be that a flower or a house or a landscape. Much to our sadness and yet joy, the days of the beefy-chested man-titty clinch cover are coming to an end, it seems.

However, a good number of covers are moving toward the more-expensive but still lovely stepback image. I am a huge fan of the stepback (until something sticky gets between the cover flaps and I can’t look at the image any more) because they often feature some truly luscious artwork. (EDIT: Let me clarify. By “sticky” I mean something gooey from a candy wrapper in the bottom of my purse, or when I splutter lemonade all over my book laughing out loud at some historical anachronisms. No masturbatory impressions were meant by the previous sentence!)

Some of the covers below are stepbacks; others are previous versions of rereleased paperbacks. But all of them have one element in common: the hair. Specifically, the Man Hair.

We asked RWA President-Elect Gayle Wilson why some art departments thought we wanted our visually depicted heroes to have breasts bigger than ours. I must amend that somewhat-rhetorical question to now include, “Why do some art departments think that the longer the hair, the sexier the heroine and the hero?” This question especially applies to historicals- am I the only one who gets a little case of the squicks when contemplating the idea that bathing didn’t happen all that often, so those long, shining locks were probably more than a little in need of some Prell?

Sarah: If you search “romance hair” or “romantic hair” you get prom designs, like this one - but I rarely see an elegantly braided and coiffed hairstyle on a romance novel cover, despite the number of descriptions contained in the novel itself of the able abigail styling the heroine’s tresses into some braided, elegant upsweep for one ball or another.

Candy: When I look at that hair, I feel like I’m looking at one of those mazes on kid’s placemats in restaurants. “Help Little Red Riding Hood Get Out of the Forest!” Except this maze is hairy. And highlighted.

Sarah: But instead of an upsweep, you get the long, tangled hair - almost as if the size of the hair is some feminine indication of sexuality. My hair is down past my shoulder blades, and I’m visibly pregnant, so I must be driving the men on the subway into a orgiastic frenzy. But this chick? All I want to do is get her a comb.

Candy: If the stupid cow goes into battle with hair flowing in the wind like that, she’d get killed in no time. Hair: It Makes A Convenient Handle!  Unless… maybe before a battle, she oils it heavily, the way Greek wrestlers oiled their bodies in days of yore to make it more difficult to get a grip?

*distracted by images of hot, nekkid Greek men, all oiled up and...*

Wait, sorry, wha? Oh, yeah. Hair. I agree with you, Sarah. She seriously needs a comb.

Sarah: Same with this chick - got tangles? And what’s up with the uber-short Brad Pitt hair? That might be the most accurate depiction of historical man-hair on a cover yet.

Candy: Long-ass hair, floating in the wind, dislodging all the lice that no doubt reside within.... MMM, romantic.

And fuck that dude’s hair. What’s with his creepy skin-tone? Hot damn, that’s a tan gone badly, badly wrong. Something about his face also makes me think of Planet of the Apes. Like, if Cornelius shaved off his monster ape sideburns, that’d be the face underneath it.

Sarah: I mean, really, what’s she saying here? Your hair is better than mine! I bow to you! I am unworthy! Let me just state for the record here, the man titty with long hair look? I am SO over it.

Candy: The only thing that comes to mind when I look at that dude is “I’m too sexy for my hair, too sexy for my hair...”

Great, besides a sinus headache, I now have THAT SONG stuck in my head.

*shakes fist at sky*

Sarah: Today, monsieur, we are going to style zee hair for zee romance cover. We have zee new style, a hot, hot tres sexy coif we call ‘Zee Hasselhoff.’ Zee bitches, zey will do ze swoon, non?

Candy: Oooh, look! The missing Hardy Boy brother, Gaylord Hardy! The one with the embarrassing predilection for disco circuit parties and chunky gold jewelry!

Sarah: Attention, attention. Federal law now prohibits the use of any and all mullets on romance novel covers. Repeat, due to changes in federal penal code 6969.13, any and all mullets depicted on romance novel covers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Candy: WOW. A perfecta of bad hair: Bad 80s bleach job for the lovely lady, and a mullet with elevated bangs for the be-titted lord.

Sarah: First, this is Beatrice Small’s Intrigued, which is a good name because I am seriously intrigued by that hair. Is it a wig? Is it a toupee? And is he so frustrated at the state of his hairdo that he’s yanking the heroine’s arm off? “You will give me your hair so I can get extensions as long as my man-titties are big, hear?”

And here’s the most awful part: on me? That hairstyle - HIS I mean - would not look too bad. It’s about time for me to cut my hair for donation anyway, so you think if I bring this picture to the hair salon they’ll give me the ‘Intrigued’ haircut? Or will I cause mass hysteria as all the stylists collapse in convulsions?

Candy: Once again, I’m amazed at the preponderance of green eyeshadow in historical times. Just goes to show that bad taste spans history.

And that guy’s hair. Wow. Now we know what happened to the evil toupee that possessed Homer Simpson in The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror IX.”

Edit: Hang on! I know where I’d seen that hair before! Behold!

The Russian mob boss guy from The Boondock Saints! Man, that toupee gets around. It’s the Paris Hilton of nasty wigs!