When a man tries to write like a woman...

I stopped by Barnes & Noble yesterday with the kids while waiting for Omaha to finish her one moment of Memorial Day shopping. We wandered the shelves without intent when a cover caught my eye. It was in the Romance section, and after scanning through it quickly I came to the conclusion that the writer must have been a man.

The cover was of a buff male torso, from the shoulders to the knees, completely naked but for a towel strategically draped in an arc across one thigh. The towel's bend rose thickly over that thigh as if to suggest the towel was hiding a large, uh, salami. (What is it with romance novels and dick size recently? At least three I've read in the past couple of months have obsessed on it as a major detail.) I know authors have no control over cover art, but that ridiculous.

The title of the thing was "Wild Beasts" or something like that, and according to the back cover it was the story of Anton, Stefan, Keitra, and Xanithra, four werewolves trying to survive and find love in modern New York. It was trashy and only adequately written, but what really made me boggle was the very last line. The last scene is a sex scene written in a painfully heterosexual style but with a gay eye: the descriptions of Stefan's equipment and Anton's lean body are rich and detailed, while the women are given the simple requirements of tits and ass, but when the foursome gets down to actual in&out, the men are opposite each other with the women between them, kissing and petting at each other while the men are kept far apart.

And then finally the last line. This made me wince: "Stefan and Anton collapsed, their women between them, warm in the security of the pack."

It reminded me of Heinlein: "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

Just so you can see it...

My, that's quite the towel!
Click to enlarge.

The book I flamed earlier is "Sexy Beast," is an anthology with three stories (the first of which is the one I reviewed), and has the cover you see in upper left. It's published by Kensington Book's in the "Aphrodisia" line.

Uh-huh.

Virtual Guns For God! And other stuff...

Here is your gun and your Bible. Your mission is to cleanse the streets of New York, to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is to conduct physical and spiritual warfare, and to take out all who resist with extreme prejudice.

That is the absolutely ridiculous premise behind Left Behind Games most recent release, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and the director admits that while the game might deserve an M rating, he hopes teenagers play it.

Talk to Action has a lovely article (yeah, I cribbed a bit from them, too) about the relationship between this God-and-Guns love story and The Purpose Driven Life people. At first, I was annoyed at how he kept using the term "children" to describe the players of what will clearly be an Older Teens game, but the article quotes people from the production house at length who are clearly aiming at the Young Teen market.

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And if that wasn't weird enough, how does this blurb catch your attention:

Members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice received a call of a suspected African "sorceress" in the holy city's Al-Seeh neighborhood. Members of the committee along with police went to the suspected den of the black arts to find a naked African woman. Embarrassed about busting into an apartment containing a naked woman, police paused just long enough for the woman to attempt an escape, still naked, through the window of her flat.

A den of the black arts? Quick, someone call Professor Gilderoy Lockhart!

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And, playing on a theme nobody understands, I realized yesterday that the hero and heroine of Speed were named "Jack" and "Annie." The mind boggles.