Thursday, September 22, 2011

Sookie and Eric : Worst Paranormal Book Sex Scenes ??

I’ve heard from numerous paranormal fantasy authors that the hardest sequences to write well are sex scenes – and, from a reviewer’s perspective, I couldn’t agree more. For every emotionally supercharged, wildly erotic passage that I read, there are dozens – no, hundreds – more that just don’t, ahem, measure up. Too much anatomical play-by-play (i.e. Pornographic Twister) makes for a gratuitous and repulsive reading experience and too much flowery description is downright comical. Words like turgid, heaving, and throbbing are a clear indication – at least for me – that a cheesy sex scene is quickly approaching. I can almost smell the Velveeta now…

Before listing some examples of good sex scenes gone bad, however, I feel it necessary to point out that a fair amount of the sex scenes in paranormal fantasy novels are meant to be amusing – Nicole Peeler’s Jane True saga and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series, for example – so please keep that in mind when reading the sometimes hilarious and sometimes deeply disturbing excerpts below.

Many readers tell me that they would rather have no sex scene at all than a badly written or awkwardly choreographed sex scene – but I disagree. Sometimes a bad sex scene produces laugh-out-loud entertainment and makes an unremarkable read suddenly memorable – albeit for the wrong reasons. And in the case of novels like Peeler’s "Tracking the Tempest," bizarrely described sex sequences can make a good story truly unforgettable – for all of the right reasons.

read on

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