I have no idea whether this sentence is actually in the book or not, but I don’t care — I read it and if I ever had a soul, it just curled up and disintegrated.
Found on Facebook
The imagery doesn’t even go together with the situation! And if ever a lover “mewled” at me, I’d have to throw them out of bed and be sick on the sheets.
Why do the hamster pups only have three legs? When do hamsters smirk?
I have one claim that the quote actually isn’t in the book. I’m willing to accept that.
I’m still shaken to the core by the existence of these words in any context.
I’m not even sure what style this is. Purple-prose? Is it meant to be so absurd and the references so jarring that it’s humorous rather than kinky? Even so, the juxtaposition between ‘hamster’ and ‘love cave’ makes me think this book was written using on an algorithm picking out random words from other best-selling romance novels. And the art came about in concocting a story around the loosely English-sounding sex-scenes the algorithm generated.
Er…is that any worse than the rest of the stuff in the book?
Just found a PDF version of it and did a search for “mewled”. No results.
Aren’t there sequels?
I know that there’s at least one sequel
“50 shades darker” I think.
This, on the other hand, really is from the book.
Spoiled food would be my first thought.
Saad:
Oh, one of those authors – swallowed three thesauruses and two dictionaries, and needs to use ALL the words. Twain had it right when he said ‘The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’
Well, hell, I’d have believed it, given what I’d heard of it before.
And it’s horrible in conjunction with the actual prose in the book, not just because of it.
In chapter 5 of the first book, well, trigger warning… the protaganist wakes up pantsless in the man’s bed after passing out drunk at a bar the night before.
Honestly don’t know what it is about this book.
Found this from PZ’s link: http://readingwithavengeance.tumblr.com/tagged/Fifty-Shades-of-Grey/chrono
It is all of the awesome right now.
No, I cannot take that as seriously meant. That just has to be someone satirizing (I almost said “poking fun”).
I gather the book isn’t much better, though.
The young hamsters are three-legged from birth defects, I assume.
Menyambal @10
Not from mom having a pre-dinner snack?
Depressingly, the drivel that is genuinely present in the actual text is by and large egregiously worse than this. I need only mention the by now infamous tampon absurdity to make this unquestionably clear.
Gilbert Gottfried’s reading of “Fifty Shades” on YouTube is one for the ages…..
I can make it even more terrible:
“His chubby Gerbil circled my puckered love cave. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he mewled, smirking at me like Richard Gere in American Gigolo.”
Crip Dyke:
It’s a trilogy. Third one is “50 Shades Freed”. 3rd on New York Times Best Sellers list when it came out, 2 million copies sold in the UK alone. In case you needed a reminder that there is no God and we live in a cold and indifferent universe.
(The title doesn’t even make fucking sense)
That is amazingly bad writing. I’ll need at least a chapter of something coherent just to take the taste out of my brain.
I read that as “Gilbert Gottlieb” and thought, What are the probabilistic epigeneticists up to now?
I’ve been reading some liveblogs of Fifty Shades. One of the bloggers seems to think that its success was a matter of “right place, right time”, where “right place” was a crossroads and “right time” was midnight.
For blow-by-blow commentaries on 50 Shades, there’s Cliff Pervocracy, Jenny Trout and The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company (book one, book two and the still-in-progress commentary on book three, updated weekly).
The short version is that no matter how bad you think the books can get, they get worse.
The book could have been so awesome if she had written it as a different genre.
What’s with her and liquid?!
Okay, that really is about diarrhea. It has to be.
Oh, I know what this is! It’s 50 Shades fan fiction.
I shall now go and wash my brain out with soap. Bad Anne.
Something horrible just occurred to me: vaginas are not puckered: anuses are. This is describing some kind of anal foreplay. Errrrr . . .
The horror of “50 Shades …” being published is bad enough, I grant. But the truly horrible thing is that it sold. Like crazy. The fact that publishing that garbage was a Good Business Decision indicts our culture more than the decision actually being made.
I knew that the BDSM people were mad about the way the book misrepresents their life, but dang. My writing teacher must be livid.
Livid with delicious longing, his feelings for me were smoldering in a cupcake-being-bruleed kind of glitter.
Dammit, that’s not pentameter…
If you want a reason to claw your eyes out, you should try the works of Kylie Chan. Horrifying.
http://kyliechan.com/
Sadly, I read all three books a few years ago while on vacation. It was tedious to say the least, but I plowed on, ramming each chapter, slamming my eyes into each page until my iPad shook, it’s screen buckled under my incessant urge.
Alas, I don’t recall the word “puckered.” Not even, “Pucker up, baby, you know, like you’ve sucked all the lemons in the world through a cocktail straw. And, speaking of cocks, you can start on mine.”
Nope. Not there.
I checked my iBooks version with search and the quote is fake. I would have remembered a delightful passage of purple prose among the beige dreck through which I was wading and any mention of a hamster would have perked me up, like a sexual tyrannosaurus meerkat.
@22 That’s the least horrifying part of this. Nothing wrong with a little butt lovin’… unless it’s described like this. This is one of the worst metaphors I can possibly imagine.
Thanks a heap. I’ll have that image on my mind for the rest of the day now.
@26 What’s wrong with Kylie Chan? Not being sarcastic, I just haven’t read her.
gijoel @30:
I’m wondering the same thing. I clicked on the link provided by Atticus Dogsbody @26 and after poking around a bit, I don’t see anything worthy of clawing one’s eyes out.
Puckered Love Cave. I call dibs on the band name.
(Some will try to abbreviate us as “PLC”, but no go – it will always be “Puckered Love Cave”. We’re purists.)
I’m pretty sure it was an entry to this contest
Here is a quiz to see if you can tell which piece of Bulwer Lyttony is 50 Shades of Grey or Contemporary Christian Music Lyrics?
This is the only 50 shades related piece of writing i’ve ever felt the need to read. And it’s hilarious.
/complete with bonus George Takei appearance
So, the idea seems to be that – since hamsters sometimes eat their young – a hamster would smirk beforehand as it *enjoys* eating its own young? Three-legged, I think, just because it’d be some sort of hamster-eugenics.
*slow blink*
*quizzical head tilt*
“The horror of “50 Shades …” being published is bad enough, I grant. But the truly horrible thing is that it sold. Like crazy. The fact that publishing that garbage was a Good Business Decision indicts our culture more than the decision actually being made.”
Come friendly asteroids, and fall on Earth
Well, it’s not in the book. You wouldn’t take a second look if it was, though.
I actually think I might be too good of a writer for these times! At least, that’s what I tell myself…
@newenlightenment, 38
Our reign has gone on long enough.
… what the actual fuck?
I remember when 50 Shades of Grey came out. My sister was reading it and left her copy on the sofa, so I picked it up and read 2 or 3 pages out of curiosity. These pages described a scene in Grey’s apartment. Ana had been a Very Bad Girl™, and had to be punished. There were tangential references to some sort of contract. Grey then proceeded to put her over his knee and spank her, at first gently, and then harder, until it began to hurt.
At this point I gave up in disgust. My sister came in, and from reading those 2 or 3 pages I correctly guessed the entire plot of the book. All I knew about the book previously was that it was literary porn with a BDSM element. It really is that transparently predictable and awful.
@ Throwaway #9
Wow, it really is just Twilight fanfic, isn’t it?
#33, grewgills
It might be more suited to the Bad Sex In Fiction Award. Presumably it is so egregiously and continuously ghastly the judges couldn’t even bear to give it a dishonorable mention.
They’ve still got a lot of work to do.
We should ask “Saturday morning breakfast cereal” to provide a 50 shades spoof adapted for alien beings with a different anatomy.
BTW have you considered the possibility that the autor of “50 shades..” may be a Vogon in disguise? They use their poetry for torture.
#44, birgerjohansson
I forsee two issues here.
1. Any spoof of 50 shades is likely to run up against something like Poe’s Law almost immediately.
2. A cursory reading of any of the examples from the text suggests that the protagonists are already in possession of alien anatomy.
I am now wondering if there is any way I could write a story in which that quote makes sense in context.
@22
I had the same thought. Vaginas/vulvas are not “puckered”. Has to be anal. Now there’s the working definition of a pucker.
Strangely, “pucker” is a word I don’t even like the sound of.
newenlightenment
Right, I don’t think you solve literature problems by crashing asteroids all over the place, so you’ve embarrassed yourself there. And what’s your problem, don’t you like girls?
Looks like Vogon poetry to me.
Thumper @ 42 – I’m pretty sure the word “literary” should never be used in conjunction with 50 Shades of Shit in any context except as the opposite. It’s terrible, horrible fanfiction of a badly written book. I know 10 people who’ve written stellar fanfic off the top of my head. This shit is not on the list.
James also engineered the popularity of the story to get it published, and apparently a lot of it is ripped off? Can’t find the link but she’s a horrible writer with good marketing skills.
@ drst
Perhaps I should have said “terrible pornographic novella”.
Thumper, Several Shades of Badly-Written Abuse is an insult to fanfic. The way I feel about this putrid dreck going mainstream kind of distantly parallels the way I feel about Thatcher – finally a woman Prime Minister (a mainstream foregrounding of something intended (supposedly) to focus on women’s desire) … and this is who (what) we get? Ugh.
A simulation of the 50-shades writing style is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. There’s no getting more formulaic than that.
http://www.xwray.com/fiftyshades
No anal sex ever occurs in the entire 50 Shades trilogy. Nor is there fisting. It is, in fact, very, very vanilla “erotica”, with the same love scene C&Ped repeatedly (“…he starts move, really move…” through the whole damn series). The “kink” is barely kink, particularly since Ana’s enthusiastic consent isn’t particularly important to Christian.
In fact, any purported quotation from the series that makes it explicit that there are reproductive organs involved is most definitely a fake quote. Ana has a demure “down there”, as far as the book is concerned. Occasionally she has “everything below [her] belly button”, just to be extra vague.
Also the books are written in present tense. Again, anything that claims to be a quote and isn’t in present tense is not a quote.
throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble, thank you for the link pointing to reading with a vengeance. It is very much all of the awesome. Also, I’m now not doing any work. You owe my boss an explanation.
@Saad #6: Also, that final comma is extraneous; including it indicates that instead of the preceding adjectives all modifying “desire”, “desire” is actually part of the list of items, indicating that the previous three are supposed to be interpreted as nouns a la Buffy-speak. As it stands, that sentence indicates that the narrator’s insides contorted with potent, contorted with needy, contorted with liquid, and contorted with desire. That sounds like food poisoning to me.
(I know it started as Twilight fanfic, but it surely had to go through an editor at least once before mainstream publication, right?)
From throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble‘s link at #9, the first line of the book: “I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror.” That sentence makes me literally angry with rage! (Though, when used properly, directly and redundantly stating otherwise-demonstrated emotions makes great hypocritical humor.)
(Also, that may be a “no” on the whole editor thing.)
Apparently Christian Grey’s company is called “Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc.” Not “Grey Enterprises, Inc.” or “Grey Holdings, LLC” or even “Grey Enterprise Holdings Co.”, but “Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc.”. E.L. James might be the most repetitively redundant author of whose work I’ve ever read a sentence.
This is bad; I actually have deadlines I need to meet today, but all I want to do is pour through terrible writing. :-(
I’m still shaken to the core by the existence of these words in any context.
Don’t despair, PZ. These words are a natural fit for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which the object is to spew forth the vilest aggregation of prose the language permits (without resorting to obscenity or profanity, of course.)
In fact, I would not be at all surprised if your example was actually an entrant in last year’s contest.
—-
Ah, I see several people are way ahead of me. Has anyone here entered the BLFC? I think the 2015 contest is still open.
congenital cynic: Strangely, “pucker” is a word I don’t even like the sound of.
Probably because of what it rhymes with. (Smucker: “With a name like that, it has to be good.”)
Take it away Charles Dance.
John Hostman @56: “…but it surely had to go through an editor at least once before mainstream publication, right?”
Speaking as a 21-year veteran of publishing:
1. There are no qualifications to be hired as an editorial assistant (from which one becomes an editor) other than a college degree, a good interview personality, and some reasonable clerical ability.
2. Or if one has enough money to start one’s own publishing business, even less qualification is needed.
3. Once inside the business, “editing prose” is a secondary skill compared to “picking books that will sell.”
Some editors work with the prose to help a writer turn a book into something that will sell. Other editors learn how to work their company’s marketing department, or choose books that will appeal to a specific, and often completely unexpected, audience. Judith Regan, for instance, has made her career out of selling books to people the rest of the industry didn’t think of as book-readers. She saw an untapped market and sought books that would sell there.
Trade publishers still have many editors who value good prose. But like any business, the company also has to value things that sell. “Good prose” and “mass appeal” are nearly orthogonal axes. One has little to do with the other. If you can get both in the same book, everyone is thrilled.
Note that “good prose” has a lot of individual preference, historical fashion, and voice-of-authority loaded on the concept. “Sells X copies and makes Y dollars” is more easily quantifiable. Publishing houses will naturally gravitate toward the latter as a metric of success. This pull is resisted by editors every day, but they’re only human.
If a successful self-published book is picked up by a regular publisher, they’re unlikely to mess with the text overmuch, no matter how awful it is. Don’t break what ain’t fixed. ;)
And apropos of nothing:
I agree entirely that 50SoG is horrible prose telling a boring story in a repetitive manner.
I think the same thing of Bridges of Madison County.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to compare and contrast the publishing paths and critical reception of those two books, and ask why they were treated so differently.
It’s not all that surprising, if you’ve ever read any commercial pornography: it’s almost all terribly written stuff because most good writers either won’t publish it in the first place and those that do keep their names off of it. It leads to the kind of throw-away prose that 50SoG exhibits, since the writers involved are either only doing it for the money or are just bad writers in the first place.
A writer friend of mine once had a job writing (anonymous) porn for a group of small magazines. He told me he finally quit, not because he didn’t still need the paycheck, but because he was proofreading a story for them one day and realized that he had written the line “She grasped his throbbing sock” and it wasn’t a typo. He decided then and there that if he didn’t quit it was going to ruin him as a writer.
Smucker’s pucker puckered up at the thought of Smucker’s puckered pucker.
I made a good thing out of something awful. Oh wait …
#19 Blake Stacy:
The Jenny Trout reads 50 Shades site is freaking hilarious!
http://jennytrout.com/?page_id=5720
From bittys link @ 35
.
“My inner goddess will cap yours in the face if you don’t shut the fuck up”
WIN!
@30 & 31: Try reading her first novel. She actually has a pretty good premise but then she starts to write. And there is no way an editor ever got near her work, if one did then they need a new job.
@ 32 I now hear that in the melody to “PYT (Pretty Young Thing)” and it’s extremely disturbing.
I’m still completely bewildered how poorly executed BDSM Twilight fanfiction (as if Twilight wasn’t wretched enough) has managed to become such a phenomenon. A friend loaned me “%0 Shades” and I almost threw it across the room. As a submissive and as someone who can actually read English it’s insulting on a thousand levels.
Someone on skeptics.stackexchange.net just tracked down the actual source of the quote. It’s from Re-Living The Dream “87JPR87” on fanfiction.net, which attributes it to 50 shades… but it’s not from the actual book:
Spamamander @68 — Thanks, you just ruined a decent song.
@ Opposeablethumbs #52
I’m not sure it can seriously be considered to be fanfic. Doesn’t fanfic kind of by definition give a serious nod to whatever it’s based on, because whoever wrote is, well… a fan?
Several Shades of Badly-Written Abuse, on the other hand (love that, btw), is just a bad rip-off of an already bad but somehow popular book-to-film monstrosity.
I have always assumed that so many people must have felt that way about Thatcher. It’s nice to have it confirmed. It’s annoying that we haven’t had a woman, or an ethnic-minority person, in charge before or since.
Did you notice that there was a clear divide this year? The leftists (Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru) all had women as leaders, and the right (Tories, UKIP) and Labour, who aren’t that far off these days anyway, all had men?
Thumper: Well the thing about 50 Shades is that it WAS a fanfic, but then it was rewritten to have “original” characters when the author actually decided to try publishing and selling it. Definitely a rip-off, but I would say it has a fanfic skeleton. That link to Twilight was erased enough for legal purposes but was still present enough to tap into the more adult members of the Twilight target audience. I would call that strategy “have your cock and eat it too”.
Thumper #71
I watched the 7-way televised debate and Sturgeon was very impressive, with Bennett for the Greens coming across well too… I’m really hoping they both get to wield considerable influence in a Labour government, I think that might be about the best we can realistically hope for.
My late mother (quite accidentally and not of her own choosing) crossed paths with Thatcher in their respective youths, and years later when the Evil Empire was at its height got invited to contribute her recollections to some sort of fawning hagiography of the Evil Empress. She told them (in emphatic but technically courteous terms) where they could stick it. (something along the lines of “any contribution that I could make to your project would quite certainly be of such a nature and expressed in such terms as to prevent your wishing to include it”).
@stwriley, 63
Oh come on. What do you people have against the stubbed toe fetish? It’s a perfectly legitimate sexual choice!
…he was proofreading a story for them one day and realized that he had written the line “She grasped his throbbing sock” and it wasn’t a typo. He decided then and there that if he didn’t quit it was going to ruin him as a writer.
So, this scene took place at a small airport on a blustery day?
@ Anteprepro #72
Ah, I see. So she wrote some fanfic and then went “Huh, I could publish this”, and changed the names? That makes an awful lot more sense.
@ Opposeablethumbs #73
I managed to catch two of them, and in my opinion Nicola Sturgeon absolutely bossed it. On a combination of personality and policies, she was streets ahead, and were it not for the pro-independence stance (I’m pro union; we don’t need to break it, we just need to improve it) and were it even possible for me to do so, I’d vote for her in a heartbeat.
I am a huge fan of the Green party, but I found Natalie Bennett quite underwhelming. Caroline Lucas was undoubtedly the better leader, in my opinion. However, of the parties I can vote for, I absolutely agree with their policies more than any other, so they will be getting my vote.
Hit post too early :(
I think I’d have liked your mum very much :)