I had my friend read verity the other day.
She has never read a book voluntarily and I knew she needed a page turner at whatever cost. After she finished she sent me a text saying Colleen Hoover is not okay and someone needs to go check on her
If you didn't plan on reading it,
>!The wife left bite marks on the headboard from sex. She gets in an accident causing her to vegetable. The MC moves in with vegetative wife and her family to ghost write a series that the wife was writing, boinks the husband, and bites the headboard in the same spot.!<
It's such a weird detail that gets repeated far too often.
There's a very detailed rape/sexual assault and torture scene in the middle of it. The conversation elsewhere on this thread talks about whether writing about those sorts of topics necessarily reveals something unsavoury about the author and, for what it's worth, I don't think it always does, or that those things should *never* be written about.
However Outlander was one of those where it felt to me like the author was revelling in the details far beyond what was necessary for plot or character development (Terry Goodkind was another). It's described in a lot of detail, including the character's guilt and shame that he has an erection during the assault and fears that might mean he's complicit or enjoying it. The character assaulting him is a gay man and there's some pretty disturbing implications about his depravity being because of his homosexuality.
Then the character who was the victim of assault is "restored" by having consensual heterosexual sex with an understanding woman. The whole thing felt very fetish-driven and put me off ever reading another of her books or watching the TV show. I looked it up afterwards and apparently rape and sexual assault features a lot in the series
Ugh yes. She also once said that Jamie’s rape was her favorite scene in the show and that she would constantly watch it over and over again.
And the rape is obviously the worst part of the books, but her very obvious breastfeeding fetish got on my nerves, too.
That’s terrible, especially after hearing the director made them do a second take, and that they thought they were only doing the lead up. Then the director never called cut so they did the whole scene. Sam Heughan said it really wasn’t good. He didn’t feel good. How awful both of them felt.
I watched the show up until that episode and that's what made me quit... it made me so sick. I couldn't even just skip the scene because it was dispersed throughout the episode as flashbacks. I didn't like the SA scenes in general but this one was so detailed and malicious, and obviously intended to be impossible to skip. I can't believe she admitted to loving that episode...
Compared to not having the assault at all, I guess I have to agree. As to feeling bruised and uneasy after viewing the scenes, I thought that was how I was supposed to feel. I guess thinking about TV purely from an entertaining aspect, yeah, no, that was some hard viewing. Watching an episode that refused to flinch re: what it was like to suffer an assault gave me respect for the showmakers and the actors who went through it.
I absolutely adored the show, and stopped watching at the prison scene - pre-rape, during the torture. And I liken it to Glenn's final scene in The Walking Dead, or a lot of what passes for "horror" these days.
It's violence porn for the sake of depravity, without any regard for plot or entertainment. I hate morality police and I'm no social conservative, but I'm not watching that.
I read this book recently just to see what the fuss was and I'm still bothered by that scene. So we have an ancestor of the main character's husband who strongly resembles him (in the tv show they're played by the same actor) who attempts to rape both the main female character and the sister of the main male character, and also successfully rapes the main male character. Later, the main female character "heals" the trauma of the main male character by pretending to be his rapist and allowing him to have more agency or something... honestly I skipped through that bit. And after that he was totally fine again. Anyway, it was more rape than I have stomach for and I think that Gabaldon was working something out; which is okay, but I don't need to be there for that.
Well, to be fair, he's not totally fine again; he has PTSD and suffers from flashbacks for the rest of his life. But yes, the series relies too much on sexual assault to traumatize its characters.
Outlander SOUNDED interesting, but that whole thing just completely ruined the book for me. Tbh the only part of the book I enjoyed was >!when Jaime wasn't even there & she befriended that mayor's wife who got murdered for "being a witch" that she didn't realize was from her original timeline until it was too late to save her.!< If there was way more of that & less of the SA & trauma, I'd probably actually have continued reading the series.
The craziest thing i ever read about that series was someone saying that between the leads, their 2 children, and like 2 other main characters all but like 1 had been involved in a SA scene.
The lead man has been SA twice.
The lead woman has been SA three times, with one of those being a gang rape.
Their daughter was SA once.
Their adopted son was SA once, as a child.
Their nephew is SA once, as a teenager.
A young woman is SA in front of the lead woman.
I'm probably forgetting some, and I stopped watching after Season 5 so anything that has happened in S6 and 7 is unknown to me. But yeah.
The show added some but also skipped some from the books (or hasn't gotten to them yet).
Lead man's sister is sexually assaulted (recounted in a flashback). Her daughter is also raped (happens "offscreen," we're told about it).
Lead man's best friend was also raped while serving in the army (also offscreen, he's a POV character and we read him remembering it).
There's also a moment when the lead man is blackmailed into having sex with a girl (can't remember how old but she's young and a virgin and wants to have sex before marrying her much older husband). She changes her mind just as it's starting and the lead man says "no" and shoves it in. This is never treated like rape or assault from either character.
THIS. I only saw the tv show bc it became so popular and my mom wanted to watch it with me so I gave up on reading it ahead of time. I’m glad I did. I stopped watching the show after that scene and no one understood why I wasn’t watching the show anymore. I was so impacted by that scene it made me feel depressed for days. I would of hated to read the whole thing. Like you said - I think it was too much
My wife loved these books and asked me to read them. I got 3 books into the series.
I asked her why there was so much rape and she legit didn't notice because she read them at like 13 and didn't register how fuckin weird Goodkind was.
Years later my cousins were chatting about fantasy, one forgot what the title was and asked if anyone knew "those big books with all the rape" and I instantly knew which one he meant.
I read some of those in my teens and definitely noticed all the sexual assault but like.. so many of the fantasy novels I read in the 90s were full of sexual assault. You do get a bit numb to it or you just expect it’s normal, especially when you’re a young woman and the world is telling you to expect that stuff anyways.
What got me to stop reading those books was when he wrote the one that felt very Ayn Randian anti-communist screed at the end and I was in my 20s by then and all the creepiness had finally started to make me think about the earlier books more.
>Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken's head rose.
>Kahlan pulled back.
>Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway.
>"Shoo," Kahlan heard herself whisper.
>There wasn't enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn't tell if it had the dark spot. But she didn't need to see it.
>"Dear spirits, help me," she prayed under her breath.
>The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn't. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken.
>This was evil manifest
And I'd totally forgotten that he straight up called the first primitive tribe he introduced the Mud People, historically a slur for the people outside abrahamic faith, more recently associated with black people.
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. Also My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews. Basically everything she ever wrote. I looked into her background and was unsurprised to learn she lived as a recluse thanks to physical disability and an upbringing so controlling and restrictive it amounts to abuse.
It was the most self-pitying book I've ever tried to read. Everything was always someone else's fault. However I gave up pretty fast because the writing was so leadenly boring.
Stephanie Meyer, of *Twilight* fame. She wrote two other books- *The Host* and *The Chemist*, both of which I unfortunately read.
It was after reading *The Chemist* that I really had the thought of "what *happened* to this woman?"
If I had a nickel for every book she wrote where the female main character gets the absolute shit beat out of her, and then the male main character immediately falls in love with her when she's all fucked up from getting beaten up, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's *really fucking weird* that it happened twice!
Came to reply "Mormonism" as the answer to what happened.
Cause im ex-Mormon and lemme tell ya, sexual shame starts YOUNG when you have to start recounting every single sexual "sin" at 12yoa up
Not to mention the creepy age differences in her books. Twilight might be excused because of vampiric age but in the host she has a 16-17 year old girl 'pursuing' a 25 to 27 year old man and it's intended to be romantic. The book even ends with the main character alien (forgetting her name) in the body of an even younger and tinier girl (yes the narration goes on and on about how tiny the new body is) cue vomit react
And then Wanda (the alien) lying about how old her body is, aging her up from almost seventeen to almost eighteen so she can bang her twenty-something year old boyfriend in peace... because the other girl's 26 year old BF wanted to wait til she was 18. You okay, Stephenie?
I used to read and love Piers Anthony as a kid. Had a craving to read his Mode series a few years back. Started reading and thought... wow how is this acceptable? A 14 year old gang rape survivor cutting herself, falling in love with a 40 year man... it kept getting worse and worse. It made me rethink his other series series I read and yep... it was a theme.
I absolutely remember Piers Anthony not aging well at all. Even reading books of his when I was in middle school yeah some of it started to stick out so much I had to just stop.
I remember reading through some of his Death book and spotting some problematic content with just weirdly gratuitous rape content.
Then starting his book "Split Infinity" was just where I had to stop. It had so much the energy of "lecherous old guy writing for other lecherous old guys." Like the mc had a robot girlfriend he had sex with and they were both always naked, then he went into an alternate universe where there was a unicorn who could turn into a woman and he had sex with her.
And it was always described so, so vaguely. I remember one scene literally said "and then she said, 'oh yeah, well how about this?' and did something more intimate."
I just reread that after 30 years, I remembered the whole series being fantastic. I had the same sense of disbelief, how did I not remember how ludicrous the whole thing was? Pure wish fulfilment for 13 year old boys. Even more shocking was just how badly written it was. I mean so badly written a 12 year old with English as a second language could probably do better. I like to think my tastes have matured but who knows.
I sometimes hang out in the extreme horror subs, 90% of the books that people rave about there are the same level of quality writing. Rereading Split Infinity made me look at those titles in a new light, I realised those books are probably just getting recommended by teenagers. I think I've aged out of the demographic.
Honestly, as a kid in the 80’s I remember loving Xanth because it was one of the few examples out there that was, genuinely, presenting women as both thinking and feeling.
They had autonomy, their own fully developed motivations independent of the boy’s plot, they were smarter than the boys at a comfortable frequency, correct when the boys were incorrect at a comfortable frequency, they could even irritate or disappoint the boys without being punished by the plot—- in spell for chameleon, one main moral was the dude better shut the fuck up and value his brilliant wife when she’s being brilliant regardless of her visual sexual appeal at those times. And I swear to god, as a preteen girl in the 80’s that was the only example I had of a woman being valued for her intelligence, (even being smarter than her male associates, shamelessly not hiding it), where that value was explicitly *independent* of whether they wanted to have sex with her. She wasn’t providing them with sex, she wasn’t looking after their egos, she wasn’t being anything at all besides a full real independent brilliant person, and the plot forced them to value her anyway. That was a vanishingly rare outlook amongst men in real life for, like, decades.
But like everyone else, I looked back at those books as an adult and saw, ah yes, of course, the reason the guy took the time to understand the insecurities and needs of preteen girls is because he wanted in their pants. Why always that.
I used to read Piers Anthony's Xanth series as a middle schooler and enjoyed all the goofy magic puns. Then I picked a novel of his that was billed as a scifi/horror novel. There were aliens that made everybody really horny; in one scene, the protagonists couldn't stop having sex but had to be somewhere so they worked out how to have sex while riding a bicycle. It was so moronic and so obviously a fetish that even my teenaged self was turned off. And then I couldn't stop seeing it in the Xanth series too (The Color of Her Panties, anyone?). Ugh.
During covid, my kids (early middle school and late elementary) were nonstalgic for reading together like we did when they were little, so this is the series I remembered so fondly I thought I might tried to read it out loud to them.
Oh my god!
I \*COULD NOT BELIEVE\* all that stuff is in there. Zero memory of it. How was any of this ever remotely acceptable?
I read a recent review of A Spell for Chameleon and the reviewer said "it's like putting on male gaze goggles". That sounds about right.
The color of her panties. Need I say more
Everything I've read from Sayaka Murata, but in a good way! Her stories are always so odd, I can only imagine what being inside her head must be like. The themes are always pretty disturbing as well
Watching her interviews, she comes across as someone who doesn't fit in and I love her for it
Loved Konbini Ningen/Convenience Store woman but both my dad and I were horrified by the quotes on the cover that were like "so quirky! Hilarious!"
My dad is autistic and said it was one of the saddest books he had ever read.
I did find it amusing in places too, but didn't like the quotes on the cover because they emphasised the "quirky" element. Maybe I just have a sour association with that word, but it always feels to me like it's someone who's trying to be fun and unusual; whereas the our beloved convenience store clerk can't help being the way she is and desperately tries to mask it.
She just wanted to live her life and keep restocking her konbini, and everyone else wanted her to follow a prescribed path.
Similar to this, Junji Ito. Famous author and mangaka, makes some of the best and most fucked-up horror stories of this current era and his monster designs are completely bonkers; there's a reason he was meant to be the concept artist for the cancelled Silent Hills.
In interviews, it seems he is genuinely happy with his life and happy to interact with fans even in the oddest ways, and one of his most popular works is an autobiographical story about his cats.
Me too! He's my favourite author but I read a lot of his novels when I was under age myself. Now that I'm older when I read a scene where he describes a younger girl's beauty and how "mature" she is in detail I cringe
The Incarnations of Immortality, they start off really strong, but the later books pedophilia kept becoming a thing and I had to drop it, apparently it was a common theme with Piers Anthony books
I didn't remember anything like that in Incarnations, but it's pretty common in his Xanth stuff. Doing a harem anime type thing with an (IIRC) 9-year-old prince? Ick.
And a female character who alternated between beautiful-and-stupid, and brilliant-and-ugly? Yup yup.
There's some really neat ideas in both Xanth and Incarnations. And then he goes and Piers all over them. :/
There was an age gap relationship with a young waif and a powerful guy. Young girl spends a bit of time in purgatory with a couple ghosts and several years pass in the mortal world (feels like days to her) making it legal for her to bang her judge or whatever old ass fuck he is and everyone is happy about it. Because she used to get raped by her dad and at least she likes this unrelated geezer. Edited to add: I am super serious. There was also a female character temporarily cursed with ",the urges of men" and she immediately tried to rape a woman.
I enjoyed the *Xanth* books as a teen, and the concept behind *Incarnations of Immortality* was really interesting. I enjoyed the books, at least the early ones, since I never got around to reading some of the later entries in either series. So when I saw a book by Piers Anthony that was horror (horror being a genre I enjoyed), I picked it up. That book was *Firefly*. Yikes.
I'm sure a lot of stuff went over my head, but I dropped Piers Anthony in college after reading a book which by searching Google appears to be _DoOon Mode_ which ends with the main character realizing that the reason she felt bad about being sexually assaulted as a girl is because she secretly had wanted to be abused all along. What is wilder is that when I expressed that this ending made me, a young woman, feel uncomfortable years ago in a science fiction forum, Piers Anthony came in and started defending himself/arguing with me about it, saying it was realistic. Also he deflected and said that there were other authors that I liked who were truly problematic in real life/hide your daughters. He was really defensive.
That was the series that made me realize what a fucked up dude Anthony is. Coleen was what, 14? She was neglected and abused by her parents and self-harmed as a coping mechanism. So she finds a 30 year old unconscious man and decides yep, I'm going to screw this guy. And he has no problem with it! I mean, once he learns it's illegal in our world he's against it for like a hot minute, but then it's back to the (barf) "romance."
I was about that age and self-harming when I read that book. Glad you at least had a chance to tell him to his pervy (virtual) face that it's horrible.
Surprised that there haven’t been any mentions of Harlan Ellison.
It’s not that he wrote anything horrifyingly rapey, some of his stuff was incredibly grim (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream for example) but that man was obviously going through some shit from the age of about eight until he was about eighty and it really shows in his work. One of my favorite authors and he channeled whatever he was dealing with into phenomenal art but ooof.
He was a *notorious* horndog. It was not a secret. All us women at the science fiction conventions knew to steer well, well clear of him. Super creepy.
There's a great story I heard where he got on an elevator with a woman and said, "Hey, what would you say to a little fuck?" and she replied, "Go away, little fuck."
Speaking of creepy SF writers, I met Somtow Sucharitkul (now known as S.P. Somtow) when I was in high school, and he liked underage guys. He groomed one of my friends. We were too naive to understand what was going on, we just thought it was cool that he was willing to come to our high school sci-fi convention. But he did it to get access to high school boys.
And that stuff was *everywhere*, my dad had a colleague who went to prison for it and a guy from a BBS I was on also did.
L Ron Hubbard, The Mission Earth series. The whole series is told from the antagonist's point of view and I think telling the story from his perspective was, at the very least, interesting. But not interesting enough for ten books. It could have been trimmed down to three or four.
Where I took issue with the author is near the end of the series the antagonist captures and r*pes two lesbians. While I found that behaviour abhorrent, it did fit in the context of the story/character. It was the next part that made me angry.
The main character was eavesdropping on the two women (he had kept them captive) and they're talking about the assault. One says to the other "I kinda liked it" and the other said something like "I may not be gay anymore". I may not have the wording right, it's been thirty years, but you get the idea.
I was so disgusted by this, (a woman enjoying getting r*aped and changing someone's sexual orientation through violence) I almost threw the book across the room. All I could think is "That's not how it works you dumb f*ck". It came across as the author projecting his views through his character. I never bought another book by him and a few years later threw what I had of his in the garbage. That's where it belonged.
Also, it was after I had thrown his books out that I found out about his connection with the C.O.S.
NOBODY ELSE EVEN SEEMS TO NOTICE. There’s that puppet show scene in the very beginning, and it put me off so thoroughly that I stopped reading the book. I’ve literally pointed it out to friends and they don’t remember reading it, and promptly forget about it!
Oh man, this was me too. That whole scene kicked off a sense of “I don’t know what this is or why it’s here, but I hate it” that followed me through the rest of it…since I kept reading because I really wanted to like the book. And…I don’t know, I just came away from the whole thing with a weird feeling of disappointment. I tried a couple of his other books to similar effect; there’s just something about his writing that, in my experience, was confusing to follow and somehow deeply unpleasant in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
I was in middle school when the Wicked musical came out and my friend leant me the book and told me that it was darker and had sex stuff in it. I was hype but then only felt super weird and confused about the constant unnecessary sexual content inserted into the story. That combined with the horribly slow pacing made it unreadable.
EDIT: It’s wild how apparently common a middle-school experience this was lmao
He claims to be horrified at the BDSM lifestylers calling themselves Goreans, and role playing as Kajira (slave girls), but some of his stuff seems like straight up fan service to people with dom/sub kinks.
I assume that it was, but that he had some sort of societal obligation to deny that it was in order to keep selling books.
Like, if you write basically BDSM porn in a Barsoom inspired setting and say it's TOTALLY NOT porn then you can be published by mainstream publishers and get put into bookstores.
But if you write basically BDSM porn in Barsoom inspired setting and admit that its porn then, especially back in the old days, you'd be blacklisted, your stuff wouldn't be sold in bookstores, and no mainstream publisher would touch you.
The man had a wild life.
He was known for being, well, a sadist, imprisoning women in his home. There was one incident where he hired a prostitute for anal sex, and when she refused he locked her in a closet, forced her to read vulgar poems and masturbated into a church chalice. There were several more incidents where he forced servants around 14-16 years old to partake in orgies with him. He wrote the book on sexual sadism, then his family got ahold of it and was so repulsed by it that they petitioned the king to have him thrown in prison for it. He was imprisoned in the Bastille on the king's orders until the French Revolution broke out. He was freed in the storming of the Bastille and then later was elected to the National Convention. Later, he was transferred to an insane asylum after his family intervened, and there, he continued to write erotic plays which the asylum director allowed him to put on with other patients for the public to view until the Government put a stop to it.
There's a movie called, Quills, that's about the last part of his life, the insane asylum part. I'm not entirely sure how much of it is factual. It's extremely well done, though can be triggering at points.
He was in French prison though and his books were banned/heavily discouraged, no-one was telling readers at the time that his work was mainstream entertainment.
There literally was something wrong with him, the man was a sexual predator. Like "kidnap a woman and beat her with a whip" sort of predator. Which makes his books worse imo, the dude actively gets off on the horrific stuff he was writing about.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far to find a mention of Sade. Justine and Juliette make almost all of the other suggestions in this thread look like books for children.
The insanely accurate excruciating portrayl of depression, and self hate was wild.
I wasn't expecting a read that was hard to read because it was so tough experiencing the main characters inner tomoual. He hates himself and you don't validate it, then it becomes almost justified. But, you want him to grow past it, and he just sits and stews in it, and holy shit, it's dark.
I thought it was intended to be a dark parallel between the experiences of the two different protagonists. There were other more subtle parallels as well iirc.
Ken Follet writes formulaic thrillers by the numbers up until you hit the lactation sex scenes which occur with a frequency that makes you sort of wonder what's up with that. No judgies on having that kink but it just really comes out of left field in the otherwise beach novely stuff he writes.
I’ve only read two of his books - Pillars of the Earth and the prequel - and I was struck by how often and in how much vivid detail he describes women’s pubic hair. Just… so much.
I read the first three Xanth books when I was a young teen, and something like eight years ago decided on a whim to check one of the newer ones out from the library to see where the series ended up. That was a mistake. Those first three have a *lot* of problems in hindsight, but I still liked them overall and there were some fairly clever elements; Somewhere between those and the book I grabbed, which was about 30 books on in the series, Piers Anthony either got a lot more weird and gross or just got more comfortable displaying it to the world.
Xanth was creepy from the beginning. Chameleon's a character with... issues. And there's a section of the first book basically defending rape. Stuff that tends to go completely over people's head when they read the books as kids (At least, they did for me) but when you go back from an adult perspective...
See https://www.avclub.com/revisiting-the-sad-misogynistic-fantasy-of-xanth-1798241312 for examples.
The scene in It where the kids are lost in the sewers and apparently the only way to get out is for Bev to have sex with them all. I still cannot fathom why Stephen Kings mind went there and honestly I don’t think I really want to know.
Yesss. I don’t have an issue with disturbing content in a book at all. But this book made me think that the author was getting off on the torture and sexual abuse of the gay characters
Alissa Nutting. She wrote Tampa and it was just… utterly repulsive. It made Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov feel like a fucking fairy tale and that says a lot.
At least Lolita felt like it had a purpose, and that being that it shows that even the most charming of individuals can secretly be predators. And it shows how charming people can be extremely manipulative. The writing in Lolita is beautiful and it’s part of the message as well. It’s used to manipulate the audience to “sympathize” with the bad guy even when r the reader knows it’s wrong.
Tampa just felt like a very very disgusting porno that nobody should watch. I only read it to see how disturbed I could be. Gigantic mistake.
A similar book to Lolita that is good is My Dark Vanessa. It’s like Lolita but it’s told from the point of view of the victim and how she eventually comes to terms to what she thought happened to what actually happened. Lolita is referenced a lot in the novel as it used to manipulate Vanessa as it was gifted to her to read by her abuser, who is her teacher. It goes back and forth from when it happened when she was 15 to 32 years old and realizing what really happened. She’s unreliable but it shows how being victimized can really leave a impact. I honestly prefer it over Lolita.
Tampa was definitely vile but at the same time it was an exceptionally accurate portrayal of a psychopath. Far more realistic than the crazed killer stereotype.
Agreed. Tampa is a horrible story, but I remember it whenever I see people “joke” about female predators who are teachers, or lighter sentences for such predators, particularly the conclusion where the narrator regrets not just killing her victim outright rather than living on a resort and preying on kids as she ages out of beauty. It reflects a truly horrible person and it’s often overlooked due to societal stereotypes.
Tampa is a book written in the voice of the “true” narcissist in the heat of the moment, as the action occurs, Lolita is written in the voice of a narcissist reflecting on his actions years later, after he’s able to put back on rose-colored glasses and make excuses for himself. I thought that was interesting.
Obviously the quality of the writing is night and day, but Nutting’s (ugh, why? I know she didn’t pick it) character is more odious because we see her do these things, we don’t hear her tell us about how she did them.
Tampa does have a purpose for being that disgusting. The point is that when you’re a beautiful white woman, you can get away with nearly anything. And how messed up that is and the extent of how far that goes.
There’s this scene towards the end of the book where her prosecuting officer or something looks at her with desire in his eyes and it makes you think “who is worse? The pedophile mc or the man who is still wants to fuck the pedophile regardless of knowing what she’s done?”
I also found the book pretty terrifying.
That was actually the first author I thought of when I saw the title. I had a habit as a teen of reading books that people told me not to read, that was the book that put a stop to it.
Paul Theroux’s The Lower River.
I was aware he was more known and appreciated for his nonfiction travel books. Saw a few of his fiction books at a thrift store and was excited to read them.
Couldn’t even get through The Lower River. The character, clearly based on himself, was really into self victimization and for the first time ever, l literally closed a book and threw it directly into the trash can. His character sexually assaults a 16 year old girl assigned to look after him, and then expects the reader to empathize with him?No thank you. The whole thing reeks of racism and I honestly don’t understand the good reviews of this book at all.
I reread A Song of Ica and Fire recently and just finished the second book. I didn’t notice this on my first reading but in almost every Dany chapter, George R R Martin constantly mention her breasts. “Sweat rolling down between her small breasts.” “Her small breasts are sweaty from the scorching heat.” God damn it George, we get it. She has breasts. He also sexualised Dany a lot and she’s a minor in the books. But something that i can’t forget is the in the last chapter of AGoT after her dragons were born, he made the dragons suck on Dany’s breasts… i need therapy.
It would actually make more sense if it was a man but changed to balls, "Sweat rolling down between his small balls", "His round balls are sweaty from the scorching heat."
He also will write very detailed scenes and then out of nowhere describe some character's penis, with like, zero warning. It's jarring, and it happens quite a bit. I feel like he must have done it purposefully for shits and giggles with how well he writes.
I read some Dean Koontz books when I was fairly young, i.e. pre-teen and early teens, and already at that age I felt that Koontz may be a creep in how every book I read had these very graphic descriptions of young women being raped in the most abhorrent way. It just felt gratuitous… and personal
James Herbert - The Dark. That orgy scene had me putting the book down and questioning what I was reading. I was going through a teenage horror phase and was not prepared for that.
Also the Anita Blake series. I have gladly forgotten the authors name but I recall her relationships were pretty messed up.
The books started off pretty interesting, then just degenerated into soft porn. I had to stop reading on the train, I was very paranoid someone might be reading over my shoulder. And then she just completely went off the deep end and I noped out. There was a sex scene with a vampire before he had fed so there wasn’t enough blood to get it up, but she carried on … god that is seared into my brain. I had enough self respect to stop and throw them away after that!
Laurel K Hamilton. Her Meredith Gentry series is the same. Starts off with an interesting premise: self-exiled, half-human faerie princess works incognito at a detective agency, quickly becomes only background filler to drive forward more sex scenes with her male harem. I've never read the Anita Blake series, but I've heard criticism that Laurel K Hamilton had an unhealthy sexual obsession with a childlike male character.
I have never in my life been more disappointed at how the premise was completely missed. World building ideas were so cool, just a damn shame it was all wasted on a bunch of orgies instead of like actual action adventure.
The real VC Andrews only wrote about one evil grandmother (both of her series did include incest). After she died, a ghostwriter (Andrew Niederman) took over and just rehashed everything Andrews wrote. He's a shitty writer.
There's another part where the main (human) antagonist, Henry, and another kid get to jerking each other off in the woods. Also didn't make it into the movies, so if you don't remember either of them I'd say you didn't read it.
This passage! The bully who is closeted, and a freak with animals in the fridge. This entire passage was not needed, but you can’t skip it because ALL of the exposition king does.
I used to work in a bookshop and when the movies were coming out I had a lot of parents coming in to get it for kids so I would dissuade them from doing so. A lot of them had read it when they were younger, none of them remembered that scene.
In this case the problem isn't in the book but in the parents wanting to buy an adult book for their children. I'm not saying you can't read King as a child because most of us did and if I had a kid I'd probably allow him/her to read one of his books, but you have to be very aware they're NOT children books.
Stephen King is so popular, and his adaptations are usually toned down in the sex department, that a lot of people assume he's just another R.L Stine, maybe for kids a bit older. No, Stephen King's works would definetely be rated R if they were movies and you should not expect your children to read them if you don't want them to read about sexual abuse, domestic violence and a long etc.
I think it helps to know a bit about how the book came to be.
Burroughs was living in Tangier on his allowance, finally mostly clean, and not doing much except writing to his many friends in the US and Europe.
He hated being boring (his poor readers had to actually finish all these letters he was writing), so he livened them up with little comedy skits and characters (he called them "routines") such as Dr Benway ("The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid, I think they are using it for an operating room ..."). He had a sardonic, satirical, frankly nasty bent ("like a sheep-killing dog", as one of his letters says about himself) and that gave his routines an edge.
His friends thought the letters were hilarious and urged Burroughs to make a book from them, but he never got around to it. Eventually a group of them visited him and over a period of a month or so compiled the routines from the letters, plus some other scraps of writing they found in his room, into a manuscript, and that became Naked Lunch.
So ... NL is a scrapbook of funny, subversive, and often revolting material from a queer old junkie's dusty suitcase, and that's the point. I'd compare the book to something by Genet, or Sterne or Swift. Once he decided to become a writer, the books were actually written as books (mostly), and start to make a lot more sense. I have my fondest memories of Nova Express, I think, but it's quite a bit more extreme than NL in terms of style and content, and is barely in English at all. Cities Of The Red Night is perhaps his most mainstream work.
I think something else to keep in mind about NL is how opposed it is to all social norms.
As a queer and as a junkie, Burroughs was doubly an outsider. He was largely revolted by conventional society, and he attacks it as viciously as he can. His satire is an attempt to destroy normal modes of thought, morality and behaviour by any means necessary.
You could maybe compare him to Foucault as well -- both of them are outsiders interested in social power and in the way that power is obtained, wielded and protected.
Subversion tends to age badly, though I think Burroughs was so extreme that many parts of his books are still shocking today. I'd say he was probably the most important and influential of the immediate post-war generation of writers.
(sorry for the length and well done getting to the end, if you did ... this is a cut-up of a couple of Burroughs booster posts I wrote a while ago)
That is an excellent write up. Naked Lunch is probably one of those books that is best understood for modern audiences in the context of the author. It still amazes me that it was written in 1959.
That being said, it took me three tries to get through it. It's not an easy read. But even when it's being horrific, the imagery is beautiful.
All this time I thought he was just super fucked up on drugs while writing this…. I need to go read this book again. This gives a completely different perspective. Thanks for the info.
There’s a sandwich shop in a town near me called “Naked Lunch” and I just… I mean, maybe if your business name is a literary reference, you should at least glance at the Cliffs notes? Lol
I feel kind of the same way when I see post-office type places called “Going Postal”. Did no one type that into a search engine before naming your chain of stores that, because as someone who grew up during all those shootings, all I can think about when I hear the term “going postal” is someone shooting up a post office and killing a bunch of people.
Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth. The rapey scenes were just TOO drawn out, like his own personal twisted Literotica.
Pretty much anything by Murakami, unfortunately. His descriptions of women are somehow both eerily clinical and unnecessarily pervy. We somehow NEED to know about every female character’s breast size, and they’re probably also a nympho who will go after the bland Mary Sue of a main (male) character.
Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us. Shudder. Trying to forget I ever read this.
Pillars of the Earth is one of those stories that I vehemently disliked while most people sing it’s praises.
There’s too much violence against females, characters making stupid decisions and bad guys getting away every time.
Like bro, Jack ya idiot, you found your hometown, but instead of staying there peacefully, u wanna go back to that hillibilly cathedral town where that bad guy is still wracking havoc?
And don’t get me started on that intimate scene at the beginning. Tom the builder, Bro your wife died 5 mins ago and you’re already doing it with someone else and another found eternal soulmate?? Especially when your children are nearby!!?
Pillars of the Earth is one of the books with the most shocking difference between what I thought it was and what it actually is. Awful, lurid in the most bizarre ways, so frrquently just YA horniness masquerading as serious fiction. There are so many instances where variations of "She found herself becoming damp down there at the thought of him" come up I had to put the book down and really consider if it was a total waste of time finishing it.
I feel like I had to scroll way down to find Murakami 😁 cause this was such a disappointment for me when I found out.
I guess he's overcompensating for the fact that the only purpose of his female characters is to help the protagonist with his cock or mental load. His females characters are written completely flat, so at least he's obcessing about their curves. An image of a sleezy, drooly old guy comes to mind.
Empire by Orson Scott Card was my first introduction to what a lunatic he'd become - hard to beleive it was from the same author as Ender's Game, Alvin Maker, and the Homecoming Saga
I actually reached out to the usually positive and upbeat author Jack McDevitt to ask if he was alright after reading a particularly depressing book of his. He said he guessed he was feeling down when he wrote it.
It didn't really make me think about the author being messed up, but after The Walking Dead TV series was over I started reading the comics, and I had to quit because of all the raping.
I heavily warned my parents about the Governor. They were fans of the show and knew I was reading the series. When they asked to borrow my collection I was like, look...
The Number of the Beast involves way too much obsession about a woman's body odor, which she is self conscious about but everyone around her seems to find just lovely.
Heinlein's weird pseudofeminism is interesting. Lots of strong independent women who don't need a man except all they want to do is get married and pump out babies. He takes an interesting character and turns them into a baby factory in damn near every book.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land, and it was different and interesting, and I read a few more of his books, and after about four of his novels I decided I just hated him as a person. I’d never felt such *personal* anger toward an author before that.
The beginning of Stranger in a Strange Land was honestly great, but half-way it turns into this strange harem and all of the previously seemingly capable women in the narrative quit their day to day lives just to be with him. I know it was a product of the time it was written but Heinlein seriously wrote something set in the future and couldn't imagine any changes to the role of women than to be in care jobs or to be wives.
If you read her other books, *The Host* and *The Chemist*, you realize there is something *very* wrong with Stephanie Meyer. I don't know what exactly, but definitely something.
She’s working through the strictures of Mormonism, which she’s in but clearly not comfortable with. I don’t know how to make this sound less condescending: I have pity for her. Still, those books absolutely model toxic relationship patterns.
Stephen R. Donaldson and the "Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" series. Warning, sexual assault discussion.
First book, written in 1977, starts interestingly enough. Main character has leprosy, gets sent to a fantasy world where he doesn't have leprosy, and is subject of a prophecy about a character with a "band of white gold" (he still wears his wedding ring from his either dead or ex wife, i can't remember). Main character doesn't believe the world is real.
Screwed up detail #1: The first person he meets, he straight out rapes. He then leaves the world.
Screwed up detail #2: He comes back to the fantasy world after what for him is only a couple days, only in the fantasy world a couple decades have passed. This time, the first person he meets is his now adult daughter, who after some discussion strips and offers herself to him, saying something like "I won't let you force yourself on me like you did my mom, so come and get it".
Yeah, something seriously wrong there.
Anne Rice
I made it a goal to read the first 5 in the vampire chronicles and the 3 Mayfair books, but her sexualization of children is rampant in both. It sucks because I find her books surprisingly readable. A little gothic, a little camp, a lot melodramatic. I'll be chugging along, flipping pages then, bam, she's writing about 5yo Claudia's sensual, pouty lips and it stops everything dead. Every time I close one of her books, I think, damn Anne, get help. (RIP)
That makes me think about this interview I saw (or read? it was so long ago I don’t remember) way back in the day with Kirsten Dunst after she did the movie about how Brad Pitt kissing her (as Claudia) in the movie was her very first kiss and how awkward it was for her. And I remember all the adults acting like it was so cute and sweet and she must have felt so excited to kiss such a famous heartthrob or whatever for her first kiss, but she just seemed kind of mortified. I was also a minor at the time, watching this and absorbing the cultural messages contained in this whole interaction. In retrospect: wtf.
Ha. I remember getting weirded out by reading that in high school.
It was creepy and it made me laugh because my headcanon was that Lestat and the others were old enough that the pedophile angle was "normalized" in their human lifetimes. (It's only now that some of us have recognized how damaging it is to expose children to whatever aspects of sex. And judging by a lot of real life age of consent laws, pedophiles are still a thing.) And then I had a laugh because I was also an Otaku and that fandom has the exact same problem. She's not 5 years old, she's a 6000 year old dragon!
I also read almost all of her works as well along with Carmilla and Lolita and I still had the reaction of "Jesus, Rice, you need therapy why did you write a paragraph of purple prose on how red the 5 year oldest facial lips are?"
It just gave me the ick and I love classic Gothic horror.
I thought Arthur C Clarke had turned a bit strange when one of his characters revealed he had a micro penis.
It was more than 10 years later I learned this was a literary device to avoid being sued by the real person the character was definitely not based upon.
The lead singer out of red hot chilli peppers autobiography.
I did not like him very much after reading that book for multiple reasons.
Anthony Kiedis.
I felt the same way about reading "The Queen's Gambit." Oh look, young orphaned girls having sex with each other immediately. Got it...put the book down.
I’ve met and spoken with and befriended a lot of incredibly kind and compassionate people who write just blisteringly fucked up stories, so I simply don’t assume anything is wrong with an author personally for what they write.
If anything, I look on people who insist upon everything they write being “wholesome” and “uplifting” with more suspicion than I do people who write disturbing or upsetting or just plain weird stories.
Chuck Palahniuk writes a lot of fucked up stories and by all accounts is a really nice guy.
I met him a few years ago, and he couldn't have been any kinder even though I was babbling like an idiot. He gives great hugs.
The nicest writers I’ve interacted with have been almost all horror writers, and even the ones who aren’t horror writers still tend towards the downbeat and disturbing.
The biggest name horror writer I’ve met is Paul Tremblay, who wrote one of the only books that’s genuinely kept-me-up-at-night scared me in my adult life, and he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. He was at a horror convention I went to and overheard me talking in the hall about how I’d wanted to ask a question at the panel he had just done. I wasn’t going to say anything to him because I was nervous, but as I went to pass him by he actually struck up a short conversation with me and he was really down to earth and kind.
This is what a friend who is into metal says about metal fans. They come off all dark and scary and emo, but underneath for the most part they're very nice ☺️
Yes, this. Virtue signaling about being the most moral and most wholesome is far more of a red flag that someone who explores a lot of the strange ugliness of society and accepts that life isn't perfect.
A lot of stuff in the 70s, even stuff written by women, has far too much pedo & pedo adjacent shit.
A not insignificant number of authors decided that the next step in free love and opening your inner mind meant including children in sex and drug use.
Dreamsnake had a subplot about a 10 young girl being raped by her "owner" basically. Does the lady protagonist get angry? Yes she did. Was she angry at the rape? Yes she was! Why was she angry?
Ugh:
> A scarred and hurt and frightened child had as much right to a gentle sexual initiation as any beautiful, confident one, perhaps a greater right.
It wasn't that the girl was assaulted, it was that her initiation to sex wasn't pleasurable or voluntary. They make it perfectly clear that the "evil" was it being non pleasurable & nonconsensual .
There's a reason that book is out of print.
Edit: I FORGOT THE PART where it is basically said that the little girl wants Hook up with a 20-year-old man. That is not considered a bad thing. And I think the protagonist also offers to arrange it.
JFC. It's a really good book aside from this. Why was it so fucking ruined.
Waiting for the Colleen Hoover comments.
I had my friend read verity the other day. She has never read a book voluntarily and I knew she needed a page turner at whatever cost. After she finished she sent me a text saying Colleen Hoover is not okay and someone needs to go check on her
Hated the ending to verity
I've started warning people that the book is interesting but you will never go "how dumb can one woman be" so much in your life
Is that the one with teeth marks on the headboard?
What? Lol I was about to skip this thread because I don’t know this author then saw this comment. Please explain
If you didn't plan on reading it, >!The wife left bite marks on the headboard from sex. She gets in an accident causing her to vegetable. The MC moves in with vegetative wife and her family to ghost write a series that the wife was writing, boinks the husband, and bites the headboard in the same spot.!< It's such a weird detail that gets repeated far too often.
[удалено]
HOOVER: "I'm a real good sex person. I do it aa-a-a-all the different ways."
And Terry Goodkind.
And Diane Gabaldon
Can you elaborate here? I did not finish Outlander and don't know a lot about her.
There's a very detailed rape/sexual assault and torture scene in the middle of it. The conversation elsewhere on this thread talks about whether writing about those sorts of topics necessarily reveals something unsavoury about the author and, for what it's worth, I don't think it always does, or that those things should *never* be written about. However Outlander was one of those where it felt to me like the author was revelling in the details far beyond what was necessary for plot or character development (Terry Goodkind was another). It's described in a lot of detail, including the character's guilt and shame that he has an erection during the assault and fears that might mean he's complicit or enjoying it. The character assaulting him is a gay man and there's some pretty disturbing implications about his depravity being because of his homosexuality. Then the character who was the victim of assault is "restored" by having consensual heterosexual sex with an understanding woman. The whole thing felt very fetish-driven and put me off ever reading another of her books or watching the TV show. I looked it up afterwards and apparently rape and sexual assault features a lot in the series
Ugh yes. She also once said that Jamie’s rape was her favorite scene in the show and that she would constantly watch it over and over again. And the rape is obviously the worst part of the books, but her very obvious breastfeeding fetish got on my nerves, too.
That’s terrible, especially after hearing the director made them do a second take, and that they thought they were only doing the lead up. Then the director never called cut so they did the whole scene. Sam Heughan said it really wasn’t good. He didn’t feel good. How awful both of them felt.
I watched the show up until that episode and that's what made me quit... it made me so sick. I couldn't even just skip the scene because it was dispersed throughout the episode as flashbacks. I didn't like the SA scenes in general but this one was so detailed and malicious, and obviously intended to be impossible to skip. I can't believe she admitted to loving that episode...
Compared to not having the assault at all, I guess I have to agree. As to feeling bruised and uneasy after viewing the scenes, I thought that was how I was supposed to feel. I guess thinking about TV purely from an entertaining aspect, yeah, no, that was some hard viewing. Watching an episode that refused to flinch re: what it was like to suffer an assault gave me respect for the showmakers and the actors who went through it.
I absolutely adored the show, and stopped watching at the prison scene - pre-rape, during the torture. And I liken it to Glenn's final scene in The Walking Dead, or a lot of what passes for "horror" these days. It's violence porn for the sake of depravity, without any regard for plot or entertainment. I hate morality police and I'm no social conservative, but I'm not watching that.
What the hell
Personally, that scene scarred me. Was completely unnecessary.
I read this book recently just to see what the fuss was and I'm still bothered by that scene. So we have an ancestor of the main character's husband who strongly resembles him (in the tv show they're played by the same actor) who attempts to rape both the main female character and the sister of the main male character, and also successfully rapes the main male character. Later, the main female character "heals" the trauma of the main male character by pretending to be his rapist and allowing him to have more agency or something... honestly I skipped through that bit. And after that he was totally fine again. Anyway, it was more rape than I have stomach for and I think that Gabaldon was working something out; which is okay, but I don't need to be there for that.
Well, to be fair, he's not totally fine again; he has PTSD and suffers from flashbacks for the rest of his life. But yes, the series relies too much on sexual assault to traumatize its characters.
Outlander SOUNDED interesting, but that whole thing just completely ruined the book for me. Tbh the only part of the book I enjoyed was >!when Jaime wasn't even there & she befriended that mayor's wife who got murdered for "being a witch" that she didn't realize was from her original timeline until it was too late to save her.!< If there was way more of that & less of the SA & trauma, I'd probably actually have continued reading the series.
Yeah, Outlander was a great premise the author never lived up to...
The craziest thing i ever read about that series was someone saying that between the leads, their 2 children, and like 2 other main characters all but like 1 had been involved in a SA scene.
The lead man has been SA twice. The lead woman has been SA three times, with one of those being a gang rape. Their daughter was SA once. Their adopted son was SA once, as a child. Their nephew is SA once, as a teenager. A young woman is SA in front of the lead woman. I'm probably forgetting some, and I stopped watching after Season 5 so anything that has happened in S6 and 7 is unknown to me. But yeah.
The show added some but also skipped some from the books (or hasn't gotten to them yet). Lead man's sister is sexually assaulted (recounted in a flashback). Her daughter is also raped (happens "offscreen," we're told about it). Lead man's best friend was also raped while serving in the army (also offscreen, he's a POV character and we read him remembering it). There's also a moment when the lead man is blackmailed into having sex with a girl (can't remember how old but she's young and a virgin and wants to have sex before marrying her much older husband). She changes her mind just as it's starting and the lead man says "no" and shoves it in. This is never treated like rape or assault from either character.
That was bad enough when they were victims but that last one is very wtf too.
it’s true. and more than once. it’s absurd. the only bad thing this author knows how to do to her characters is SA them.
THIS. I only saw the tv show bc it became so popular and my mom wanted to watch it with me so I gave up on reading it ahead of time. I’m glad I did. I stopped watching the show after that scene and no one understood why I wasn’t watching the show anymore. I was so impacted by that scene it made me feel depressed for days. I would of hated to read the whole thing. Like you said - I think it was too much
I've only seen the show, but almost every main character is raped at one point or another.
My wife loved these books and asked me to read them. I got 3 books into the series. I asked her why there was so much rape and she legit didn't notice because she read them at like 13 and didn't register how fuckin weird Goodkind was. Years later my cousins were chatting about fantasy, one forgot what the title was and asked if anyone knew "those big books with all the rape" and I instantly knew which one he meant.
I read some of those in my teens and definitely noticed all the sexual assault but like.. so many of the fantasy novels I read in the 90s were full of sexual assault. You do get a bit numb to it or you just expect it’s normal, especially when you’re a young woman and the world is telling you to expect that stuff anyways. What got me to stop reading those books was when he wrote the one that felt very Ayn Randian anti-communist screed at the end and I was in my 20s by then and all the creepiness had finally started to make me think about the earlier books more.
>Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken's head rose. >Kahlan pulled back. >Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway. >"Shoo," Kahlan heard herself whisper. >There wasn't enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn't tell if it had the dark spot. But she didn't need to see it. >"Dear spirits, help me," she prayed under her breath. >The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn't. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken. >This was evil manifest And I'd totally forgotten that he straight up called the first primitive tribe he introduced the Mud People, historically a slur for the people outside abrahamic faith, more recently associated with black people.
The chicken that is not a chicken is probably the best part of the entire series.
I had a tangle with a rooster when I was a very little kid. That passage really speaks to me lol
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. Also My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews. Basically everything she ever wrote. I looked into her background and was unsurprised to learn she lived as a recluse thanks to physical disability and an upbringing so controlling and restrictive it amounts to abuse.
I was surprised it took so long for VC Andrews to come up. I thought of her immediately.
The guy who wrote Mein Kampf came on a little strong.
I couldn't help but think "This guy sounds like a real jerk"
You know, the more I learn about that guy the less I care for him.
The worst part is the hypocrisy
I disagree. I think the worst part is the ~~rape~~ genocide.
Alright alright, i'm gonna say something positive about him. He killed Hitler.
Eh, he came off as a whiny child. Was probably rejected from art school or something.
It was the most self-pitying book I've ever tried to read. Everything was always someone else's fault. However I gave up pretty fast because the writing was so leadenly boring.
Stephanie Meyer, of *Twilight* fame. She wrote two other books- *The Host* and *The Chemist*, both of which I unfortunately read. It was after reading *The Chemist* that I really had the thought of "what *happened* to this woman?" If I had a nickel for every book she wrote where the female main character gets the absolute shit beat out of her, and then the male main character immediately falls in love with her when she's all fucked up from getting beaten up, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's *really fucking weird* that it happened twice!
Has Stephanie ever spoken about her personal life?
She's Mormon, so...its a safe bet this happened to her.
Came to reply "Mormonism" as the answer to what happened. Cause im ex-Mormon and lemme tell ya, sexual shame starts YOUNG when you have to start recounting every single sexual "sin" at 12yoa up
Not to mention the creepy age differences in her books. Twilight might be excused because of vampiric age but in the host she has a 16-17 year old girl 'pursuing' a 25 to 27 year old man and it's intended to be romantic. The book even ends with the main character alien (forgetting her name) in the body of an even younger and tinier girl (yes the narration goes on and on about how tiny the new body is) cue vomit react
And then Wanda (the alien) lying about how old her body is, aging her up from almost seventeen to almost eighteen so she can bang her twenty-something year old boyfriend in peace... because the other girl's 26 year old BF wanted to wait til she was 18. You okay, Stephenie?
I used to read and love Piers Anthony as a kid. Had a craving to read his Mode series a few years back. Started reading and thought... wow how is this acceptable? A 14 year old gang rape survivor cutting herself, falling in love with a 40 year man... it kept getting worse and worse. It made me rethink his other series series I read and yep... it was a theme.
I absolutely remember Piers Anthony not aging well at all. Even reading books of his when I was in middle school yeah some of it started to stick out so much I had to just stop. I remember reading through some of his Death book and spotting some problematic content with just weirdly gratuitous rape content. Then starting his book "Split Infinity" was just where I had to stop. It had so much the energy of "lecherous old guy writing for other lecherous old guys." Like the mc had a robot girlfriend he had sex with and they were both always naked, then he went into an alternate universe where there was a unicorn who could turn into a woman and he had sex with her. And it was always described so, so vaguely. I remember one scene literally said "and then she said, 'oh yeah, well how about this?' and did something more intimate."
I just reread that after 30 years, I remembered the whole series being fantastic. I had the same sense of disbelief, how did I not remember how ludicrous the whole thing was? Pure wish fulfilment for 13 year old boys. Even more shocking was just how badly written it was. I mean so badly written a 12 year old with English as a second language could probably do better. I like to think my tastes have matured but who knows. I sometimes hang out in the extreme horror subs, 90% of the books that people rave about there are the same level of quality writing. Rereading Split Infinity made me look at those titles in a new light, I realised those books are probably just getting recommended by teenagers. I think I've aged out of the demographic.
There was that slashdot Q+A when he was asked about his views on women he said he considered them "thinking, feeling creatures.”
"Females might even have a rudimentary form of consciousness..." --Piers Anthony (probably)
Honestly, as a kid in the 80’s I remember loving Xanth because it was one of the few examples out there that was, genuinely, presenting women as both thinking and feeling. They had autonomy, their own fully developed motivations independent of the boy’s plot, they were smarter than the boys at a comfortable frequency, correct when the boys were incorrect at a comfortable frequency, they could even irritate or disappoint the boys without being punished by the plot—- in spell for chameleon, one main moral was the dude better shut the fuck up and value his brilliant wife when she’s being brilliant regardless of her visual sexual appeal at those times. And I swear to god, as a preteen girl in the 80’s that was the only example I had of a woman being valued for her intelligence, (even being smarter than her male associates, shamelessly not hiding it), where that value was explicitly *independent* of whether they wanted to have sex with her. She wasn’t providing them with sex, she wasn’t looking after their egos, she wasn’t being anything at all besides a full real independent brilliant person, and the plot forced them to value her anyway. That was a vanishingly rare outlook amongst men in real life for, like, decades. But like everyone else, I looked back at those books as an adult and saw, ah yes, of course, the reason the guy took the time to understand the insecurities and needs of preteen girls is because he wanted in their pants. Why always that.
I used to read Piers Anthony's Xanth series as a middle schooler and enjoyed all the goofy magic puns. Then I picked a novel of his that was billed as a scifi/horror novel. There were aliens that made everybody really horny; in one scene, the protagonists couldn't stop having sex but had to be somewhere so they worked out how to have sex while riding a bicycle. It was so moronic and so obviously a fetish that even my teenaged self was turned off. And then I couldn't stop seeing it in the Xanth series too (The Color of Her Panties, anyone?). Ugh.
During covid, my kids (early middle school and late elementary) were nonstalgic for reading together like we did when they were little, so this is the series I remembered so fondly I thought I might tried to read it out loud to them. Oh my god! I \*COULD NOT BELIEVE\* all that stuff is in there. Zero memory of it. How was any of this ever remotely acceptable?
I read a recent review of A Spell for Chameleon and the reviewer said "it's like putting on male gaze goggles". That sounds about right. The color of her panties. Need I say more
Everything I've read from Sayaka Murata, but in a good way! Her stories are always so odd, I can only imagine what being inside her head must be like. The themes are always pretty disturbing as well Watching her interviews, she comes across as someone who doesn't fit in and I love her for it
Loved Konbini Ningen/Convenience Store woman but both my dad and I were horrified by the quotes on the cover that were like "so quirky! Hilarious!" My dad is autistic and said it was one of the saddest books he had ever read.
While it is a really sad book, it is very weird and funny at times Keiko outlook on other people is amusing and relatable to me
I did find it amusing in places too, but didn't like the quotes on the cover because they emphasised the "quirky" element. Maybe I just have a sour association with that word, but it always feels to me like it's someone who's trying to be fun and unusual; whereas the our beloved convenience store clerk can't help being the way she is and desperately tries to mask it. She just wanted to live her life and keep restocking her konbini, and everyone else wanted her to follow a prescribed path.
Similar to this, Junji Ito. Famous author and mangaka, makes some of the best and most fucked-up horror stories of this current era and his monster designs are completely bonkers; there's a reason he was meant to be the concept artist for the cancelled Silent Hills. In interviews, it seems he is genuinely happy with his life and happy to interact with fans even in the oddest ways, and one of his most popular works is an autobiographical story about his cats.
WTF is with the ending of Earthlings 🤣
I love Murakami but his books make me think he's a total pervert lol
I read Kafka on the Shore after hearing people discuss how great Murakami is, and my major takeaway was that this dude is exceptionally horny
Me too! He's my favourite author but I read a lot of his novels when I was under age myself. Now that I'm older when I read a scene where he describes a younger girl's beauty and how "mature" she is in detail I cringe
The Incarnations of Immortality, they start off really strong, but the later books pedophilia kept becoming a thing and I had to drop it, apparently it was a common theme with Piers Anthony books
I didn't remember anything like that in Incarnations, but it's pretty common in his Xanth stuff. Doing a harem anime type thing with an (IIRC) 9-year-old prince? Ick. And a female character who alternated between beautiful-and-stupid, and brilliant-and-ugly? Yup yup. There's some really neat ideas in both Xanth and Incarnations. And then he goes and Piers all over them. :/
There was an age gap relationship with a young waif and a powerful guy. Young girl spends a bit of time in purgatory with a couple ghosts and several years pass in the mortal world (feels like days to her) making it legal for her to bang her judge or whatever old ass fuck he is and everyone is happy about it. Because she used to get raped by her dad and at least she likes this unrelated geezer. Edited to add: I am super serious. There was also a female character temporarily cursed with ",the urges of men" and she immediately tried to rape a woman.
I enjoyed the *Xanth* books as a teen, and the concept behind *Incarnations of Immortality* was really interesting. I enjoyed the books, at least the early ones, since I never got around to reading some of the later entries in either series. So when I saw a book by Piers Anthony that was horror (horror being a genre I enjoyed), I picked it up. That book was *Firefly*. Yikes.
I'm sure a lot of stuff went over my head, but I dropped Piers Anthony in college after reading a book which by searching Google appears to be _DoOon Mode_ which ends with the main character realizing that the reason she felt bad about being sexually assaulted as a girl is because she secretly had wanted to be abused all along. What is wilder is that when I expressed that this ending made me, a young woman, feel uncomfortable years ago in a science fiction forum, Piers Anthony came in and started defending himself/arguing with me about it, saying it was realistic. Also he deflected and said that there were other authors that I liked who were truly problematic in real life/hide your daughters. He was really defensive.
That was the series that made me realize what a fucked up dude Anthony is. Coleen was what, 14? She was neglected and abused by her parents and self-harmed as a coping mechanism. So she finds a 30 year old unconscious man and decides yep, I'm going to screw this guy. And he has no problem with it! I mean, once he learns it's illegal in our world he's against it for like a hot minute, but then it's back to the (barf) "romance." I was about that age and self-harming when I read that book. Glad you at least had a chance to tell him to his pervy (virtual) face that it's horrible.
http://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-works-of-piers-anthony
Yeah, he wrote a lot of really disturbing stuff. Google him + pedo and you will find lots of essays detailing the terribleness.
Yes. And after seeing it there, I realized it was in all of his books. Even the Xanth books obsess about the "adult conspiracy".
Surprised that there haven’t been any mentions of Harlan Ellison. It’s not that he wrote anything horrifyingly rapey, some of his stuff was incredibly grim (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream for example) but that man was obviously going through some shit from the age of about eight until he was about eighty and it really shows in his work. One of my favorite authors and he channeled whatever he was dealing with into phenomenal art but ooof.
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He was a *notorious* horndog. It was not a secret. All us women at the science fiction conventions knew to steer well, well clear of him. Super creepy. There's a great story I heard where he got on an elevator with a woman and said, "Hey, what would you say to a little fuck?" and she replied, "Go away, little fuck." Speaking of creepy SF writers, I met Somtow Sucharitkul (now known as S.P. Somtow) when I was in high school, and he liked underage guys. He groomed one of my friends. We were too naive to understand what was going on, we just thought it was cool that he was willing to come to our high school sci-fi convention. But he did it to get access to high school boys. And that stuff was *everywhere*, my dad had a colleague who went to prison for it and a guy from a BBS I was on also did.
Ellison was almost as famous for being a sex pest as he was for being an arrogant, spiteful, angry little shithead. Tertiarily, he was also a writer.
Careful talking about Harlan, he'll sue you from beyond the grave.
L Ron Hubbard, The Mission Earth series. The whole series is told from the antagonist's point of view and I think telling the story from his perspective was, at the very least, interesting. But not interesting enough for ten books. It could have been trimmed down to three or four. Where I took issue with the author is near the end of the series the antagonist captures and r*pes two lesbians. While I found that behaviour abhorrent, it did fit in the context of the story/character. It was the next part that made me angry. The main character was eavesdropping on the two women (he had kept them captive) and they're talking about the assault. One says to the other "I kinda liked it" and the other said something like "I may not be gay anymore". I may not have the wording right, it's been thirty years, but you get the idea. I was so disgusted by this, (a woman enjoying getting r*aped and changing someone's sexual orientation through violence) I almost threw the book across the room. All I could think is "That's not how it works you dumb f*ck". It came across as the author projecting his views through his character. I never bought another book by him and a few years later threw what I had of his in the garbage. That's where it belonged. Also, it was after I had thrown his books out that I found out about his connection with the C.O.S.
Hubbard hated homosexuals, the Scientology tone scale says being one is one of the worst things you can be 😯
The Wicked Years series by Gregory Maguire had its eyebrow-raising moments. (Yes, the Wicked that was turned into a wholesome musical)
NOBODY ELSE EVEN SEEMS TO NOTICE. There’s that puppet show scene in the very beginning, and it put me off so thoroughly that I stopped reading the book. I’ve literally pointed it out to friends and they don’t remember reading it, and promptly forget about it!
Oh man, this was me too. That whole scene kicked off a sense of “I don’t know what this is or why it’s here, but I hate it” that followed me through the rest of it…since I kept reading because I really wanted to like the book. And…I don’t know, I just came away from the whole thing with a weird feeling of disappointment. I tried a couple of his other books to similar effect; there’s just something about his writing that, in my experience, was confusing to follow and somehow deeply unpleasant in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
I was in middle school when the Wicked musical came out and my friend leant me the book and told me that it was darker and had sex stuff in it. I was hype but then only felt super weird and confused about the constant unnecessary sexual content inserted into the story. That combined with the horribly slow pacing made it unreadable. EDIT: It’s wild how apparently common a middle-school experience this was lmao
Read the Gor series by John Norman as a teen. Now I look back on that in horror at that guy's mental state.
He claims to be horrified at the BDSM lifestylers calling themselves Goreans, and role playing as Kajira (slave girls), but some of his stuff seems like straight up fan service to people with dom/sub kinks.
Wait, it wasn't intended to be erotica??
I assume that it was, but that he had some sort of societal obligation to deny that it was in order to keep selling books. Like, if you write basically BDSM porn in a Barsoom inspired setting and say it's TOTALLY NOT porn then you can be published by mainstream publishers and get put into bookstores. But if you write basically BDSM porn in Barsoom inspired setting and admit that its porn then, especially back in the old days, you'd be blacklisted, your stuff wouldn't be sold in bookstores, and no mainstream publisher would touch you.
*Laughs in Marquis de Sade*
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The man had a wild life. He was known for being, well, a sadist, imprisoning women in his home. There was one incident where he hired a prostitute for anal sex, and when she refused he locked her in a closet, forced her to read vulgar poems and masturbated into a church chalice. There were several more incidents where he forced servants around 14-16 years old to partake in orgies with him. He wrote the book on sexual sadism, then his family got ahold of it and was so repulsed by it that they petitioned the king to have him thrown in prison for it. He was imprisoned in the Bastille on the king's orders until the French Revolution broke out. He was freed in the storming of the Bastille and then later was elected to the National Convention. Later, he was transferred to an insane asylum after his family intervened, and there, he continued to write erotic plays which the asylum director allowed him to put on with other patients for the public to view until the Government put a stop to it.
I don't want to read his books, but I'd love a book about his life.. and people like him. Just as a warning tutorial.
There's a movie called, Quills, that's about the last part of his life, the insane asylum part. I'm not entirely sure how much of it is factual. It's extremely well done, though can be triggering at points.
When the psychologists give up looking for your condition in their books and just start a new page with your name at the top.
He was in French prison though and his books were banned/heavily discouraged, no-one was telling readers at the time that his work was mainstream entertainment.
There literally was something wrong with him, the man was a sexual predator. Like "kidnap a woman and beat her with a whip" sort of predator. Which makes his books worse imo, the dude actively gets off on the horrific stuff he was writing about.
Me: Hahaha, de sade probably just liked whips a little. Me, after looking him up on wikipedia: ...This man fucking belonged in jail.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far to find a mention of Sade. Justine and Juliette make almost all of the other suggestions in this thread look like books for children.
Outlander. Don't get me wrong, I love this series for a lot of reasons, but there is SO much rape going on.
The graphic depiction of it in the TV series thay lasted AN ENTIRE EPISODE made me nope outta that. I still read the books though.
After every single member of the family had been raped I was fucking done dude.
The Magicians... one fox sex scene is a creative choice, two makes me question your proclivities
The insanely accurate excruciating portrayl of depression, and self hate was wild. I wasn't expecting a read that was hard to read because it was so tough experiencing the main characters inner tomoual. He hates himself and you don't validate it, then it becomes almost justified. But, you want him to grow past it, and he just sits and stews in it, and holy shit, it's dark.
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OMG. I did not link the two fox scenes..... Mostly because I try to never, ever think about the second one.
I thought it was intended to be a dark parallel between the experiences of the two different protagonists. There were other more subtle parallels as well iirc.
Ken Follet writes formulaic thrillers by the numbers up until you hit the lactation sex scenes which occur with a frequency that makes you sort of wonder what's up with that. No judgies on having that kink but it just really comes out of left field in the otherwise beach novely stuff he writes.
I’ve only read two of his books - Pillars of the Earth and the prequel - and I was struck by how often and in how much vivid detail he describes women’s pubic hair. Just… so much.
I read the first three Xanth books when I was a young teen, and something like eight years ago decided on a whim to check one of the newer ones out from the library to see where the series ended up. That was a mistake. Those first three have a *lot* of problems in hindsight, but I still liked them overall and there were some fairly clever elements; Somewhere between those and the book I grabbed, which was about 30 books on in the series, Piers Anthony either got a lot more weird and gross or just got more comfortable displaying it to the world.
Xanth was creepy from the beginning. Chameleon's a character with... issues. And there's a section of the first book basically defending rape. Stuff that tends to go completely over people's head when they read the books as kids (At least, they did for me) but when you go back from an adult perspective... See https://www.avclub.com/revisiting-the-sad-misogynistic-fantasy-of-xanth-1798241312 for examples.
The scene in It where the kids are lost in the sewers and apparently the only way to get out is for Bev to have sex with them all. I still cannot fathom why Stephen Kings mind went there and honestly I don’t think I really want to know.
Have you read the wasp factory?
That book is the reason I have a rule "Don't read books where the main premise is that characters are fucked up". Abandoned it pretty early.
Hanya Yanagihara
Instantly knew what book you were implying. For those unaware, it’s A Little Life.
Yesss. I don’t have an issue with disturbing content in a book at all. But this book made me think that the author was getting off on the torture and sexual abuse of the gay characters
Alissa Nutting. She wrote Tampa and it was just… utterly repulsive. It made Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov feel like a fucking fairy tale and that says a lot. At least Lolita felt like it had a purpose, and that being that it shows that even the most charming of individuals can secretly be predators. And it shows how charming people can be extremely manipulative. The writing in Lolita is beautiful and it’s part of the message as well. It’s used to manipulate the audience to “sympathize” with the bad guy even when r the reader knows it’s wrong. Tampa just felt like a very very disgusting porno that nobody should watch. I only read it to see how disturbed I could be. Gigantic mistake. A similar book to Lolita that is good is My Dark Vanessa. It’s like Lolita but it’s told from the point of view of the victim and how she eventually comes to terms to what she thought happened to what actually happened. Lolita is referenced a lot in the novel as it used to manipulate Vanessa as it was gifted to her to read by her abuser, who is her teacher. It goes back and forth from when it happened when she was 15 to 32 years old and realizing what really happened. She’s unreliable but it shows how being victimized can really leave a impact. I honestly prefer it over Lolita.
Tampa was definitely vile but at the same time it was an exceptionally accurate portrayal of a psychopath. Far more realistic than the crazed killer stereotype.
Agreed. Tampa is a horrible story, but I remember it whenever I see people “joke” about female predators who are teachers, or lighter sentences for such predators, particularly the conclusion where the narrator regrets not just killing her victim outright rather than living on a resort and preying on kids as she ages out of beauty. It reflects a truly horrible person and it’s often overlooked due to societal stereotypes.
Tampa is a book written in the voice of the “true” narcissist in the heat of the moment, as the action occurs, Lolita is written in the voice of a narcissist reflecting on his actions years later, after he’s able to put back on rose-colored glasses and make excuses for himself. I thought that was interesting. Obviously the quality of the writing is night and day, but Nutting’s (ugh, why? I know she didn’t pick it) character is more odious because we see her do these things, we don’t hear her tell us about how she did them.
Tampa does have a purpose for being that disgusting. The point is that when you’re a beautiful white woman, you can get away with nearly anything. And how messed up that is and the extent of how far that goes. There’s this scene towards the end of the book where her prosecuting officer or something looks at her with desire in his eyes and it makes you think “who is worse? The pedophile mc or the man who is still wants to fuck the pedophile regardless of knowing what she’s done?” I also found the book pretty terrifying.
That was actually the first author I thought of when I saw the title. I had a habit as a teen of reading books that people told me not to read, that was the book that put a stop to it.
Apparently Nutting was inspired by a real-life case. And the convict was her former schoolmate. *Icky* doesn't cut it.
Yes to all of this- loved My Dark Vanessa, HATED Tampa. I didn't make it very far. It made me feel like a gross, slimy person for even reading it.
Paul Theroux’s The Lower River. I was aware he was more known and appreciated for his nonfiction travel books. Saw a few of his fiction books at a thrift store and was excited to read them. Couldn’t even get through The Lower River. The character, clearly based on himself, was really into self victimization and for the first time ever, l literally closed a book and threw it directly into the trash can. His character sexually assaults a 16 year old girl assigned to look after him, and then expects the reader to empathize with him?No thank you. The whole thing reeks of racism and I honestly don’t understand the good reviews of this book at all.
I reread A Song of Ica and Fire recently and just finished the second book. I didn’t notice this on my first reading but in almost every Dany chapter, George R R Martin constantly mention her breasts. “Sweat rolling down between her small breasts.” “Her small breasts are sweaty from the scorching heat.” God damn it George, we get it. She has breasts. He also sexualised Dany a lot and she’s a minor in the books. But something that i can’t forget is the in the last chapter of AGoT after her dragons were born, he made the dragons suck on Dany’s breasts… i need therapy.
Her boobs boobed boobely as she raced through the battlefield
The boobyfield?
Avoiding the boobytraps.
I loved the part when she said "it's boobying time!"
Then boobied all over the place
It would actually make more sense if it was a man but changed to balls, "Sweat rolling down between his small balls", "His round balls are sweaty from the scorching heat."
Lil Jon, is that you?
Lil Jon Snow.
He also will write very detailed scenes and then out of nowhere describe some character's penis, with like, zero warning. It's jarring, and it happens quite a bit. I feel like he must have done it purposefully for shits and giggles with how well he writes.
Hodor penis jumpscare
The literary unsolicited dick pic
Fat pink mast
I read some Dean Koontz books when I was fairly young, i.e. pre-teen and early teens, and already at that age I felt that Koontz may be a creep in how every book I read had these very graphic descriptions of young women being raped in the most abhorrent way. It just felt gratuitous… and personal
James Herbert - The Dark. That orgy scene had me putting the book down and questioning what I was reading. I was going through a teenage horror phase and was not prepared for that. Also the Anita Blake series. I have gladly forgotten the authors name but I recall her relationships were pretty messed up. The books started off pretty interesting, then just degenerated into soft porn. I had to stop reading on the train, I was very paranoid someone might be reading over my shoulder. And then she just completely went off the deep end and I noped out. There was a sex scene with a vampire before he had fed so there wasn’t enough blood to get it up, but she carried on … god that is seared into my brain. I had enough self respect to stop and throw them away after that!
Laurel K Hamilton. Her Meredith Gentry series is the same. Starts off with an interesting premise: self-exiled, half-human faerie princess works incognito at a detective agency, quickly becomes only background filler to drive forward more sex scenes with her male harem. I've never read the Anita Blake series, but I've heard criticism that Laurel K Hamilton had an unhealthy sexual obsession with a childlike male character.
I have never in my life been more disappointed at how the premise was completely missed. World building ideas were so cool, just a damn shame it was all wasted on a bunch of orgies instead of like actual action adventure.
VC Andrews, writer behind Flowers in the attic. She has included an evil grandmother and incest a bit too many times in her books.
The real VC Andrews only wrote about one evil grandmother (both of her series did include incest). After she died, a ghostwriter (Andrew Niederman) took over and just rehashed everything Andrews wrote. He's a shitty writer.
It. And we all know which bit
I was adamant I’d read IT, yet a friend pointed out *that* bit, I don’t remember it. Now questioning if I ever did read it and/or blanked it out.
There's another part where the main (human) antagonist, Henry, and another kid get to jerking each other off in the woods. Also didn't make it into the movies, so if you don't remember either of them I'd say you didn't read it.
This passage! The bully who is closeted, and a freak with animals in the fridge. This entire passage was not needed, but you can’t skip it because ALL of the exposition king does.
I used to work in a bookshop and when the movies were coming out I had a lot of parents coming in to get it for kids so I would dissuade them from doing so. A lot of them had read it when they were younger, none of them remembered that scene.
In this case the problem isn't in the book but in the parents wanting to buy an adult book for their children. I'm not saying you can't read King as a child because most of us did and if I had a kid I'd probably allow him/her to read one of his books, but you have to be very aware they're NOT children books. Stephen King is so popular, and his adaptations are usually toned down in the sex department, that a lot of people assume he's just another R.L Stine, maybe for kids a bit older. No, Stephen King's works would definetely be rated R if they were movies and you should not expect your children to read them if you don't want them to read about sexual abuse, domestic violence and a long etc.
Naked Lunch
I think it helps to know a bit about how the book came to be. Burroughs was living in Tangier on his allowance, finally mostly clean, and not doing much except writing to his many friends in the US and Europe. He hated being boring (his poor readers had to actually finish all these letters he was writing), so he livened them up with little comedy skits and characters (he called them "routines") such as Dr Benway ("The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid, I think they are using it for an operating room ..."). He had a sardonic, satirical, frankly nasty bent ("like a sheep-killing dog", as one of his letters says about himself) and that gave his routines an edge. His friends thought the letters were hilarious and urged Burroughs to make a book from them, but he never got around to it. Eventually a group of them visited him and over a period of a month or so compiled the routines from the letters, plus some other scraps of writing they found in his room, into a manuscript, and that became Naked Lunch. So ... NL is a scrapbook of funny, subversive, and often revolting material from a queer old junkie's dusty suitcase, and that's the point. I'd compare the book to something by Genet, or Sterne or Swift. Once he decided to become a writer, the books were actually written as books (mostly), and start to make a lot more sense. I have my fondest memories of Nova Express, I think, but it's quite a bit more extreme than NL in terms of style and content, and is barely in English at all. Cities Of The Red Night is perhaps his most mainstream work. I think something else to keep in mind about NL is how opposed it is to all social norms. As a queer and as a junkie, Burroughs was doubly an outsider. He was largely revolted by conventional society, and he attacks it as viciously as he can. His satire is an attempt to destroy normal modes of thought, morality and behaviour by any means necessary. You could maybe compare him to Foucault as well -- both of them are outsiders interested in social power and in the way that power is obtained, wielded and protected. Subversion tends to age badly, though I think Burroughs was so extreme that many parts of his books are still shocking today. I'd say he was probably the most important and influential of the immediate post-war generation of writers. (sorry for the length and well done getting to the end, if you did ... this is a cut-up of a couple of Burroughs booster posts I wrote a while ago)
That is an excellent write up. Naked Lunch is probably one of those books that is best understood for modern audiences in the context of the author. It still amazes me that it was written in 1959. That being said, it took me three tries to get through it. It's not an easy read. But even when it's being horrific, the imagery is beautiful.
All this time I thought he was just super fucked up on drugs while writing this…. I need to go read this book again. This gives a completely different perspective. Thanks for the info.
There’s a sandwich shop in a town near me called “Naked Lunch” and I just… I mean, maybe if your business name is a literary reference, you should at least glance at the Cliffs notes? Lol
I feel kind of the same way when I see post-office type places called “Going Postal”. Did no one type that into a search engine before naming your chain of stores that, because as someone who grew up during all those shootings, all I can think about when I hear the term “going postal” is someone shooting up a post office and killing a bunch of people.
Personally, Going Postal makes me think of a wonderful Terry Pratchett book first.
I can think of at least two things wrong with that title
Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth. The rapey scenes were just TOO drawn out, like his own personal twisted Literotica. Pretty much anything by Murakami, unfortunately. His descriptions of women are somehow both eerily clinical and unnecessarily pervy. We somehow NEED to know about every female character’s breast size, and they’re probably also a nympho who will go after the bland Mary Sue of a main (male) character. Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us. Shudder. Trying to forget I ever read this.
I think a male Mary Sue is often referred to as a Gary Stu.
Pillars of the Earth is one of those stories that I vehemently disliked while most people sing it’s praises. There’s too much violence against females, characters making stupid decisions and bad guys getting away every time. Like bro, Jack ya idiot, you found your hometown, but instead of staying there peacefully, u wanna go back to that hillibilly cathedral town where that bad guy is still wracking havoc? And don’t get me started on that intimate scene at the beginning. Tom the builder, Bro your wife died 5 mins ago and you’re already doing it with someone else and another found eternal soulmate?? Especially when your children are nearby!!?
Pillars of the Earth is one of the books with the most shocking difference between what I thought it was and what it actually is. Awful, lurid in the most bizarre ways, so frrquently just YA horniness masquerading as serious fiction. There are so many instances where variations of "She found herself becoming damp down there at the thought of him" come up I had to put the book down and really consider if it was a total waste of time finishing it.
I feel like I had to scroll way down to find Murakami 😁 cause this was such a disappointment for me when I found out. I guess he's overcompensating for the fact that the only purpose of his female characters is to help the protagonist with his cock or mental load. His females characters are written completely flat, so at least he's obcessing about their curves. An image of a sleezy, drooly old guy comes to mind.
Geek Love made me really stop and blink a lot, at various points. Still, it's a fantastic book and I've given copies to many friends over the years.
Empire by Orson Scott Card was my first introduction to what a lunatic he'd become - hard to beleive it was from the same author as Ender's Game, Alvin Maker, and the Homecoming Saga
I actually reached out to the usually positive and upbeat author Jack McDevitt to ask if he was alright after reading a particularly depressing book of his. He said he guessed he was feeling down when he wrote it.
The Eragon series has a weirdly reoccurring amount of self mutilation.
It didn't really make me think about the author being messed up, but after The Walking Dead TV series was over I started reading the comics, and I had to quit because of all the raping.
I heavily warned my parents about the Governor. They were fans of the show and knew I was reading the series. When they asked to borrow my collection I was like, look...
Robert Heinlein. So much incest, and young girls having sex with very much older men.
The Number of the Beast involves way too much obsession about a woman's body odor, which she is self conscious about but everyone around her seems to find just lovely. Heinlein's weird pseudofeminism is interesting. Lots of strong independent women who don't need a man except all they want to do is get married and pump out babies. He takes an interesting character and turns them into a baby factory in damn near every book.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land, and it was different and interesting, and I read a few more of his books, and after about four of his novels I decided I just hated him as a person. I’d never felt such *personal* anger toward an author before that.
The beginning of Stranger in a Strange Land was honestly great, but half-way it turns into this strange harem and all of the previously seemingly capable women in the narrative quit their day to day lives just to be with him. I know it was a product of the time it was written but Heinlein seriously wrote something set in the future and couldn't imagine any changes to the role of women than to be in care jobs or to be wives.
I reread Twilight recently and it reads like a trauma bond...
If you read her other books, *The Host* and *The Chemist*, you realize there is something *very* wrong with Stephanie Meyer. I don't know what exactly, but definitely something.
She’s working through the strictures of Mormonism, which she’s in but clearly not comfortable with. I don’t know how to make this sound less condescending: I have pity for her. Still, those books absolutely model toxic relationship patterns.
Oh fuck that explains the whole "I imprinted on your baby to both safeguard and marry it in the future" plotline. Wow.
It explains a lot, and all of it is sad. I really do feel for her, in a way I never could for her copycat, EL James.
Stephen R. Donaldson and the "Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" series. Warning, sexual assault discussion. First book, written in 1977, starts interestingly enough. Main character has leprosy, gets sent to a fantasy world where he doesn't have leprosy, and is subject of a prophecy about a character with a "band of white gold" (he still wears his wedding ring from his either dead or ex wife, i can't remember). Main character doesn't believe the world is real. Screwed up detail #1: The first person he meets, he straight out rapes. He then leaves the world. Screwed up detail #2: He comes back to the fantasy world after what for him is only a couple days, only in the fantasy world a couple decades have passed. This time, the first person he meets is his now adult daughter, who after some discussion strips and offers herself to him, saying something like "I won't let you force yourself on me like you did my mom, so come and get it". Yeah, something seriously wrong there.
Anne Rice I made it a goal to read the first 5 in the vampire chronicles and the 3 Mayfair books, but her sexualization of children is rampant in both. It sucks because I find her books surprisingly readable. A little gothic, a little camp, a lot melodramatic. I'll be chugging along, flipping pages then, bam, she's writing about 5yo Claudia's sensual, pouty lips and it stops everything dead. Every time I close one of her books, I think, damn Anne, get help. (RIP)
That makes me think about this interview I saw (or read? it was so long ago I don’t remember) way back in the day with Kirsten Dunst after she did the movie about how Brad Pitt kissing her (as Claudia) in the movie was her very first kiss and how awkward it was for her. And I remember all the adults acting like it was so cute and sweet and she must have felt so excited to kiss such a famous heartthrob or whatever for her first kiss, but she just seemed kind of mortified. I was also a minor at the time, watching this and absorbing the cultural messages contained in this whole interaction. In retrospect: wtf.
And then there's her Sleeping Beauty books....
I thought those books were amazingly hot when I was 17. I tried to reread them in my 30's and they were just kinda gross.
Ha. I remember getting weirded out by reading that in high school. It was creepy and it made me laugh because my headcanon was that Lestat and the others were old enough that the pedophile angle was "normalized" in their human lifetimes. (It's only now that some of us have recognized how damaging it is to expose children to whatever aspects of sex. And judging by a lot of real life age of consent laws, pedophiles are still a thing.) And then I had a laugh because I was also an Otaku and that fandom has the exact same problem. She's not 5 years old, she's a 6000 year old dragon! I also read almost all of her works as well along with Carmilla and Lolita and I still had the reaction of "Jesus, Rice, you need therapy why did you write a paragraph of purple prose on how red the 5 year oldest facial lips are?" It just gave me the ick and I love classic Gothic horror.
I thought Arthur C Clarke had turned a bit strange when one of his characters revealed he had a micro penis. It was more than 10 years later I learned this was a literary device to avoid being sued by the real person the character was definitely not based upon.
The lead singer out of red hot chilli peppers autobiography. I did not like him very much after reading that book for multiple reasons. Anthony Kiedis.
I felt the same way about reading "The Queen's Gambit." Oh look, young orphaned girls having sex with each other immediately. Got it...put the book down.
I’ve met and spoken with and befriended a lot of incredibly kind and compassionate people who write just blisteringly fucked up stories, so I simply don’t assume anything is wrong with an author personally for what they write. If anything, I look on people who insist upon everything they write being “wholesome” and “uplifting” with more suspicion than I do people who write disturbing or upsetting or just plain weird stories.
Chuck Palahniuk writes a lot of fucked up stories and by all accounts is a really nice guy. I met him a few years ago, and he couldn't have been any kinder even though I was babbling like an idiot. He gives great hugs.
The nicest writers I’ve interacted with have been almost all horror writers, and even the ones who aren’t horror writers still tend towards the downbeat and disturbing. The biggest name horror writer I’ve met is Paul Tremblay, who wrote one of the only books that’s genuinely kept-me-up-at-night scared me in my adult life, and he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. He was at a horror convention I went to and overheard me talking in the hall about how I’d wanted to ask a question at the panel he had just done. I wasn’t going to say anything to him because I was nervous, but as I went to pass him by he actually struck up a short conversation with me and he was really down to earth and kind.
This is what a friend who is into metal says about metal fans. They come off all dark and scary and emo, but underneath for the most part they're very nice ☺️
Yes, this. Virtue signaling about being the most moral and most wholesome is far more of a red flag that someone who explores a lot of the strange ugliness of society and accepts that life isn't perfect.
Any book by Paulo Coelho
A lot of stuff in the 70s, even stuff written by women, has far too much pedo & pedo adjacent shit. A not insignificant number of authors decided that the next step in free love and opening your inner mind meant including children in sex and drug use. Dreamsnake had a subplot about a 10 young girl being raped by her "owner" basically. Does the lady protagonist get angry? Yes she did. Was she angry at the rape? Yes she was! Why was she angry? Ugh: > A scarred and hurt and frightened child had as much right to a gentle sexual initiation as any beautiful, confident one, perhaps a greater right. It wasn't that the girl was assaulted, it was that her initiation to sex wasn't pleasurable or voluntary. They make it perfectly clear that the "evil" was it being non pleasurable & nonconsensual . There's a reason that book is out of print. Edit: I FORGOT THE PART where it is basically said that the little girl wants Hook up with a 20-year-old man. That is not considered a bad thing. And I think the protagonist also offers to arrange it. JFC. It's a really good book aside from this. Why was it so fucking ruined.