‘His bulbous salutation’: the 2015 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]tudying English Literature doesn’t mean that it’s all Austen, Shakespeare and Wilde. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a taste for the more vulgar things in life – especially when they’re (intentionally or otherwise) funny. So imagine my glee when I discovered the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award!

Nominations for this award don’t go to bad books – this isn’t your average Mills and Boon, Fifty Shades-esque trash. In fact, as the Review’s own website tells us, the prize honours an author who has “produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” The 2014 prize went to Ben Okri, a distinguished author who has received a number of prestigious awards, including the 1993 Booker for The Famished Road.

This year’s contenders included Richard Bausch’s Before, During, After, Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, Tomas Espedal’s Against Nature, Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Making of Zombie Wars, Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying, Morrissey’s List of the Lost and George Pelecanos’s The Martini Shot.

Bad sex scenes can be bad for different reasons. Some of the acts described here sound downright painful. “Lotto…was not ready,” writes Groff. “It didn’t matter. Gwennie shoved him in though she was dry.” Surely there can’t be anything sexy about that, for either party? Espedal’s Héloïse isn’t much better; she “kisses his face and licks it. She bites his lip. She bites his cheek…shouts his name in his ear…”

Surely there can’t be anything sexy about that, for either party?

Cohen’s scene mashes together Song of Solomon and a beginners’ French lesson:

“Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop – Psalms were about to pour out of me.

“Vous?”

“Josh,” I said.

“Vous habillé.”

“Je vais me undressed, clothes off, unhabillé, déshab.”

her breasts were like young fawns…

Pelecanos manages to achieve unintentional hilarity: “She stroked my pole…I rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide, and then I split her.”

My favourite, though, has to be Morrissey, who had me screaming with laughter as I attempted to read this paragraph-long sentence in one breath:

“At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”

I challenge you to do the same without letting out a giggle or two.

Finally, I’ll leave you with another choice quote, not from this year’s nominations, but from 2014. From ‘DD-MM-YY’ in Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan: “God. It’s like sticking your cock into the sun.”

Image Credits: Audrey / Flickr (Header)