very purple...

[ratcreature]

So I'm nearly finished with The Valley of Horses and the sex scenes make me want to spork my eyes. I think fanfic (of both the slash and het kind) has spoiled me with its availability (and normalcy) of at least decent sex scenes. That is, if the story is okay, the sex scenes may not be my thing, or may be gratuitous IMO, but they usually won't make me wish for a spork, so when that happens in original fiction I'm caught unprepared, though the heavy angst probably should have been a warning sign.

After a nearly ridiculous amount of overblown angst and melodrama where both Alya and Jondalar misinterpret the other and think "Oh woe! S/He thinks I'm repulsive!" or "Oh woe! I'm never going to find a mate!" etc. etc. for many, many pages, they finally have sex and it's very-- "purple" really doesn't really encompass it. I would quote, but the sex scene that I couldn't continue reading without posting to my LJ about it has been going on for pages already and is not over yet, and a short quote really wouldn't do it justice.

The book's sex scenes are certainly nowhere near the worst I've read, but still quite bad.

Comments

Re: LOL

[ratcreature]

Well, it was "just" a cave lion who while larger than today's lions didn't have sabre-teeth.... but yeah, I probably would have appreciated that more in sixth grade, and maybe not even have hoped that it would eat the horse already. OTOH in sixth grade I would have been bored to tears worse than now by the sex and probably grossed out. I really wasn't the most precocious kid. It took me until reading lesbian mysteries as a teenager to appreciate sex scenes.

But I get that embarrassing moment. I once put a comic by a favorite artist on my wish list, and it was really kind of explicit, which I hadn't realized when reading about it, and well, with comics it's kind of more obvious than with books...