Like Zorro: Bad Sex in Fiction
Thursday, November 29th, 2007WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS VERY BAD DESCRIPTIONS OF SEX. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN PERIL.
Fifteen years ago the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award was born. Its aim: “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
At the very least, this award shows how difficult it can be to write a decent sex scene. In the writers’ defence, I must say that I’ve just finished a book which was nominated for this award last year, A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon. When reading the selected scene in context, it fit perfectly with the overall tone of the writing and characterization. When taken in isolation though, it was ridiculous.
2007: The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer
Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni’s death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One – that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!
–
2006: Twentysomething by Iain Hollingshead
She’s wearing a short, floaty skirt that’s more suited to July than February. She leans forward to peck me on the cheek, which feels weird, as she’s never kissed me on the cheek before. We’d kissed properly the first time we met. And that was over three years ago.
But the peck on the cheek turns into a quick peck on the lips. She hugs me tight. I can feel her breasts against her chest. I cup my hands round her face and start to kiss her properly, She slides one of her slender legs in between mine. Oh Jack, she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair. She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.
–
2005: Winkler by Giles Coren
And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.
–
2004: I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, ‘Stop!’? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, ‘No, Hoyt,’ in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.
***
Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog…
***
…the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair – what’s that! – Her panties were so wet down…there the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right…therethere
–
2003: Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal
She’s taking off her blouse. It’s on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She’s taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There’s a design as well. You gasp.
‘What’s that?’ you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator…As your hands roam her back, her breasts, and trace the swastika on her mound you start feeling like an ancient Aryan warlord yourself…
She sandwiches your nozzle between her tits, massaging it with a slow rhythm. A trailer to bookmark the events ahead. For now she has taken you in her lovely mouth. Your palms are holding her neck and thumbs are at her ears regulating the speed of her head as she swallows and then sucks up your machinery.
She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time…
She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.
–
2002: Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam
She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and on to his shoulders – Mr Hughes’s shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes’s penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin. Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he’d used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: ‘… dislocation of the second MTPJ … titanium hemi-implant …’
‘Yes!’ she whispered back. ‘Dorsal subluxation … flexion deformity of the first metatarsal …’
They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm – long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed with gasping cries.
‘Wait,’ Ralph panted. ‘let’s do it the other way.’ Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and knees and knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way – tighter, more exciting. She cupped his pin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.
‘Oh yes!’ she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. ‘Yes, oh Malcolm, yes!”
–
2001: Rescue Me by Christopher Hart
Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole. And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged. I try twitching, and then shaking my leg, but to no avail. At last, disastrously, I try squeezing her hand painfully between my bony thighs, but this only serves to inflame her ardour the more. Ever northward moves her hand, while she smiles languorously at my right ear. And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror…she will surely want to pitch her tent.
–
2000: Kissing England by Sean Thomas
It is time, time to fuck her. Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her smallwhite tidy body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features… Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more
She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa.
Aiwa – She says, as he enters her slimy red-peppers-in-olive-oil cunt – Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
–
1999: Starcrossed by AA Gill
‘…His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don’t say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It’s difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It’s hot and damp, and then, Christ; it’s amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as…’
‘As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?’
‘A fucking salami. Shut up, John.’***
‘…he takes his clothes off until he’s just wearing his boots. I hook my nails into his really taut bottom and he pumps and nearly chokes me.’
‘How did he get his trousers off over his boots? I mean, does he take his boots off and put them back on again?’
‘Shut up. I pull my dress off and I’m naked. He reaches down and roughly grabs me between the legs. I can feel his long, bony finger slip inside me. His thumb slides into the crack of my bottom and lifts me like…’
‘A bowling ball? A six-pack?’
‘Like I was light as a feather.’***
She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar…
–
1998: Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks
Between her legs she felt the touch of his hand while he whispered in her ear. “Madame Guilbert, you are a remarkable woman. If you were not married I might think myself in love with you.”
“Please, Octave. Please.”
Charlotte heard her own voice as she begged him to begin, but he kept her waiting, whispering, “Dominique, you’re so beautiful”‘ while his hand caressed her until she could take no more but reached out and pulled him into her.She felt Julien clench his body in desperate self-control. He moved slowly back and forth for a few minutes, then briefly stopped.
“Dominique,” he breathed, “this is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments.”She pushed against him, reclaimed him, and he began to move more vigorously, then sigh with sad rapture as though he recognised his time was limited.
At the last moment she did feel a rise of feeling in herself as he groaned out her presumed name for the final time; but what name she called out in return she could not have said, as her mind was full of the picture of Julien being annihilated, as he slumped down gasping on top of her, breaking into tiny dying fragments.
–
1997: The Matter of the Heart by Nicholas Royle
“She made a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren”
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1996: The Big Kiss by David Huggins
“Liz squeaked like wet rubber”
–
1995: Gridiron by Philip Kerr
“Detaching mind from over-eager gnomon and its exquisitely appointed, shadowy task, he began to make love to her.”
–
1994: The Stonebreakers by Philip Hook
“Their jaws ground in feverish mutual mastication. Saliva and sweat. Sweat and saliva. There was a purposeful shedding of clothing.”
–
1993: A Time to Dance by Melvyn Bragg
”a relief map of mysteries”
–
3:25 pm on 1-Dec-07
Ugh! And I can hear Melvyn Bragg’s voice saying that last little one out loud!
4:36 am on 2-Dec-07