LKH Is Everywhere...

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure if this particular author has been discussed already, so please excuse me if I’m bringing up an old point. Also, this rant is a bit long, so please forgive me. I just couldn’t sum up the horrible badness of this author within a short space...she’s just so bad....

 

Sunny.

 

One name, a whole world of pain and utter trash. I can’t begin to describe how horrendous her story was. Only that I spent the entire thinking to myself, “Is this LKH in disguise?”

Warning Spoilers:

 

I was introduced to Sunny via a short story collection, On The Prowl. A slim paperback with half dressed woman in leopard print on the front (my God, why?), and the tagline ‘inhuman passions’. Of course I’d be surprised if a urban paranormal book could be described without the words ‘dark’, ‘passions’, ‘dark passions,’ ‘inhuman passions/lusts’, or ‘dark orgasmic mayhem.’ The ‘inhuman’ part is a bit ridiculous. As a human, I really would be more interested in human passions, as oppose to inhuman ones. ‘Inhuman passions’ makes me think of dogs getting it on, or cats. Yeah, not my cup of tea.

 

 The only reason I bought this book, was because Patricia Briggs had contributed one story (and a very fine story it was). Keep in mind, this was a slim book containing four short stories. Briggs managed to write a good story about love without the obligatory sex scene. The other two writers restrained themselves to one fairly short sex scene. While Sunny had to fit in not one, but two incredibly long and horribly drawn out sex scenes.

 

I am convinced that if Sunny is not merely a bad writer copying LKH, then she is LKH in disguise. The writing was reminiscent of LKH’s abysmally florid and adjective packed prose. Why, she can make anything into a descriptive adjective. Verbs, nouns, none are safe. The very title of her short story, Mona Lisa Betwining, shows Sunny’s special word skills. I can only assume that ‘betwining’ is supposed to refer to Mona Lisa’s need to ‘twine’ herself around every man in that story.

 

Mona Lisa is the Anita Blake of the story, only she doesn’t have big breasts so it isn’t outright plagiarism (such a clever ploy.) Having Mona Lisa bemoan the fact that she isn’t big breasted, is also some failed attempt to try and diminish the epic Mary Sue’ness of the character. Sort of a “she’s not perfect, since she doesn’t have big breasts.” Of course she is pale like Anita, since pale is the new tan. She has dark hair like Anita, doesn’t like to wear ‘girly’ clothes like Anita. She is the Queen of the Monere (I have no clue what those things are, other then Moon people/shape-shifter/Sues), but is of Mixed Blood so she gets even more awesome powers, another Anita trait. She has a harem of attractive men falling over themselves for a chance to fuck her...like Anita. Sunny herself even describes the Mona Lisa series with this very LKH sentence:

 

For more on Mona Lisa and her beautiful men, indulge your senses....

 

Wow, LKH and Dove chocolate combine into one glorious whole.

 

Now that Sunny has given the world another Anita Blake, she also proceeds to skip over the plot in her story and just write awkwardly bad sex scenes, standard LKH procedure of course. However instead of long drawn out conversations, we get a scene where Mona Lisa runs around the forest half-naked, until her sexy man Amber catches her and proceeds to have sex with her in one of the most disturbingly rape-like sex scenes I have ever read.

 

He filled my soft emptiness with his hard fullness. Crammingly so.

 

Crammingly so...that...oh God, I think my brain just shorted out. Crammingly, yes, Sunny has invented yet another word, a painful word that I think is supposed to be erotic.

 

He was a big man, everywhere. And his sudden invasion stretched me almost unbearably, caught me between the prongs of acute pain and acute pleasure, blurring the lines between them.

 

If this isn’t LKH in disguise, then Sunny is doing a disturbingly accurate job of channeling LKH. Pain and pleasure become one, as that is erotic. Mona Lisa/Anita certainly loves the painful sex.

 

Swallowed my cry.

 

Another LKH treasure is presented to us via Sunny.

 

Called forth the lunar lightness that dwelt within us, so that our glow illuminated our skin and filled the night air with building incandescence, growing brighter and brighter as I wound tighter and tighter.

 

More of a Merry moment here. Mona Lisa can glow ‘like she swallowed the moon.’ She can also describe it with more words.

 

So we move on with this halting and barely there plot. I have no idea what is going on, since nothing is going on. Except sex. Mona Lisa ends up in the woods again, with a different man, Dontaine. Now she has some sort of ‘bloodlust’ going on (Anita moment). Of course she solves the problem with an Anita solution. Channel the bloodlust into sex, very logical.

 

...leading me to where he pointed straight up like a giant tree towering over thick brush.

 

Sunny and LKH have shown us all that sex just isn’t worth it, if they’re not hung like a horse. And really, how hard is it to say ‘penis?’ Sunny and LKH are very apt at dancing around the word and using ‘male hardness’, ‘throbbing hardness’, ‘maleness’, ‘manhood’, ‘throbbing/pulsing/bursting/magical member.’ Sunny, LKH, it’s time to use grown-up words.

 

As I realized that what filled that supple hardness in my mouth was not muscle, but blood. Blood that called so strongly to me, so suddenly, that I ripped myself away from him...

 

Too bad for Mona Lisa, she can’t indulge Anita’s great love of oral. She can’t get pregnant as well, so it limits her options and gives Sunny the opportunity to write more ridiculously bad phrases.

 

...as the golden fall of his hair brushed the sensitive skin of my belly, my thighs, like a thousand whispering kisses.

 

???

 

...his forefinger feathering lightly over my plump and swollen pearl that he had plucked free from the outer folds.

 

It can’t get worse....but it does.

 

...a pinching pluck of my swollen nub. A deep plunge of his thick tongue spearing into me, as if he were driving a blade home.

 

After the orgasmic climax of that atrocity, Mona Lisa realizes that she loves him. Because they had sex...or something. Yeah, I don’t get it either. So then Mona Lisa has to see to his pleasure, because that’s just the kind of gal she is. Like Anita, giving her man an orgasm shows that she loves him, and cares of for him...instead of giving actual love and care. But since Mona Lisa can’t get pregnant, Sunny dares to write something that not even LKH has done. One of the most horrifying moments in literature...a painfully written anal sex scene...painful in more ways then one.

 

I will spare you all the horror of that, needless to say that I scrubbed out my eyes with bleach after that. Of course since Mona Lisa is Anita, the pain and tightness was enjoyable. Leading to yet another LKH moment:

 

Until that fine line of pleasure and pain became blurred, and then it became one...

 

After that, Sunny writes the standard LKH epilogue. Where Mona Lisa/Anita talks about what she has learned in the midst of her orgies. Mona Lisa has become a succubus...and I am seriously considering the possibility that Sunny is LKH in disguise.

 

The descriptive tagline under Sunny’s name sums it all up.

 

Fans of Laurell K. Hamilton will love Sunny.

 

They would be the only ones who could appreciate something like this.

 

Sunny ends her story with a short message to her readers (does she even have any?).

 

But for every pain, my darlings, I promise there will be pleasure...

 

I can certainly guarantee the pain.

 

Comments

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

Thick brush? He needs to trim that, for realz, yo.

Alas, I have seen Sunny in the flesh, and she is not Laurel. There are two of these creatures writing among us.

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

So this Sunny chick is real...I don't know which is better. The idea of Sunny being LKH in disguise, or the fact that Sunny is real and writes like a clone of LKH.

[x--shameless.livejournal.com]

HOW DOES THIS CRAP GET PUBLISHED. DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ THAT AND ENJOY IT?

I don't understand ;_;

But at leaast it makes me feel a bit better about my writing. No matter how much I may dislike something of mine, at least it's not this bad!

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Crammingly so.

This makes me think of a man who is losing his erection and desperately trying to stuff the wilting thing in in the hopes it will get hard again.

And he "plucks" her clitoris out of her labia? It's detachable?

Personally, fellow lashers, I'm not afraid to say that a very very very very big cock is actually not a great deal of fun sometimes because it BLOODY HURTS.

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Even without gwynethfar's comment above, I'd say this couldn't be LKH, cuz her Sue character actually has a clit (no matter how appallingly it's described -- sorry, I don't want to imagine that body part getting "plucked" from anywhere, ow!).

I will, however, be giggling my ass off over "crammingly" for the rest of the day. XD

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

Why do they always clone bad examples??

[lilian413.livejournal.com]

But the senseless metaphors- and the disgusting imagery- and the grammar- CANNOT COMPUTE. *explodes*

When did 'we had sex, therefore I must love you. And more importantly, you must worship the ground I walk upon. So have I said, so mote it be' become mainstream??? And where can I hide until it goes away?

Who publishes this crap? Just so I know NOT to submit my manuscript to them, in the possibility of being even remotely associated with this drivel!!!!

P.S: The first person POV is also a dead give away that Sunny (what, was SparklyMcDarkityPants taken already??) is of the LKH 'school' (and I use the term loosely) of writing...

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a school so much as instinctive knowledge and greatness. After all, great writers like LKH and Sunny don't need no stinkin' school to learn about writing. They are born that way, and woe to anyone who tries to interfere with their greatness. Editing, who needs it? Writing classes, a waste of the time. Spell-check, only wusses use it. A plot, over-rated.

[bleedtoblue.livejournal.com]

um,pass the brain bleach please. Ew, just....ew.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

It only hurts when the guy doesn't pre-heat the oven. Which none of these gifted men seem to know how to do even after eons of living.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Well, at the risk of Laurellish TMI, I spent some time with a rather gifted gentleman not so long ago and the oven was very, very hot, and it was still quite sore. That, of course, is probably because unlike Merrynita, I had had a bit of cock-free time in my life. Those two are probably well stretched out at all times due to the endless shagging. Either that or neither of them is as OMGTIGHT as they think they are.

I suppose all Merry's men are just so overwhelmingly excited at the prospect of a bonk after eons that, despite being gods and things, they revert to 15 year old male levels of sexual skill.

Re: the shame - I has it.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

A long as you don't think she's wonderful there is no shame.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

we had sex, therefore I must love you.

See all 70s Mills and Boon/Harlequin novels. It happens ALL THE TIME. Even in the ones where the women are forced to marry a man they hate, who rapes them. They have a self-loathing orgasm and are instantly, irrevocably in love.

Fortunately after he's abused her for a few more chapters, he reveals that he loves her and all is well. In fact often he only rapes her because he thinks she's a whore, and then when he realises - because men can 'tell', you know - that she's actually a virgin, he freaks out and runs off to the town tramp and weeps in her arms because he's OMGSOINLOVE. But our heroine doesn't know that till page 123.

[orthent.livejournal.com]

Thick brush? He needs to trim that, for realz, yo.

I'd suggest Roundup, myself.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

You'd think they would be stretched out. Hot dog in a hallway as my friends used to call it. Good thing these girls are fictional.

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

For as much as this stuff claims to be pro-woman, it subscribes to a whoooooole lotta male fantasies.

[talymil.livejournal.com]

Oh god that same damn still happens.

The worst one I read was about 2 years ago. This mercenary guy is trapped in some place in the Middle East and this ballerina mistaken exotic dancer (trust me it happens constantly in this book) is in the same place because she was kidnapped to be a sex slave.
Anyway she's sent to the merc to "lower his guard" and she tries to reason with him that she's been kidnapped and needs help and he's like "Whatever you lying whore" Eventually they both escape into the desert in a jeep and he still doesn't believe a word she says (only reason she came with him was because she managed to threaten to stabbed him with a nail file. He was tied up for sex at the time)
They have godawful UST/foreplay/sexual haressment where he gropes her and shoves his tongue down her throat (to prove a point) but even when she's saying "stop!" It's okay because she starts swimming with lust each time.

The climax is when they find sanctuary and later on he throws to the ground and attempts to rape her (There was very little ambiguity in this scene. Much less than the LKH's shower scene) But Oh Snap! He can feel that she was telling the truth that she was a virgin so he pulls away and is like "Oh shit you ARE telling the truth well I can't have sex with you now." But now she's like "But I want you now!! :(" So they have sex and afterwards fight of the guys that were chasing them then Deus Ex Machina the Merc's brothers, fellow mercanaries come to the rescue in a helicopter.

Woo! you think this would be over but no turns out he never actually found out the ballerina's name (He had been calling Salome as an insult the whole time) so when they got back to the US he couldn't find her. A few months later he goes to this ballet performance (His whole family is filthy rich too and hansome *vomits*) and OMG he sees her on stage.

Now a NORMAL person may decide to go back stage afterwards and see if they can meet said person but this bastard fucking STALKS her back to her house and confronts (with lots of pushing into walls and arm twistinggrabbing)

Now I'm vague on this but I'm pretty sure it's ends like this.

M:How come you didn't let me find you?!I love you!"
B:Because you never actually asked what your name was even though I asked you what yours was.
M:Oh well what is your name?
B:Um it's Judy.
M:...Meh I like Salome better so I'll keep calling you that.

END
*headdesk*

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

My GOD.

Salome as an insult. You mean, a woman who'll have his head on a plate if he doesn't give it up? Yeah, whatever.

Ugh, I must find this book, because I bet you anything she's mistaken as a belly dancer (it being the ME) and as I am one, I know that I would love and adore this book with all my heart.

Is he supposed to be Middle Eastern himself? Because that would explain all the arm-twisting about dancing on stage and stuff. OMG U HOR! U MUST ONLY DANCE FOR ME NOW SALOME!!!

[cactus-wren.livejournal.com]

Oh my, the crammingly is just so effing bad. Nononononono.

But really, is the Briggs story in the Mercedes Thompson universe? Because someone here mentioned her name a few weeks ago and I ordered her Mercedes books from the library. I'm starting #3 tonight and I have to say I'm really enjoying them. I'm a little tired of all these authors thinking they have to have a love triangle going on between their female and lead and two hot supernatural dudes (Mercedes, Kitty, Sookie) but I do enjoy the rest of the storylines, so it helps me ignore the annoying love triangles.

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

It is in the Mercy universe. It features Charles, son of the Marrock Bran, who has to investigate another pack. And a new female lead, Anna, who is an Omega (some spoiler stuff involved with that). At any rate, there is no love triangle, just chemistry between Charles and Anna (not due to them having wonderous magical sex...thank God). It was good, I'm looking forward the the "Cry Wolf" that kind of continues their tale.

Re: the shame - I has it.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I did the same thing in a book store. Sunny acknowledges LKH and Anne Bishop -- which made me cry, because I love Anne Bishop. Apparently she has blatantly ripped off aspects of LKH and Bishop's worlds. Sad, really.

[bubblefaerie.livejournal.com]

I actually read the first two books. I was curious because I heard that she basically copied LKH. Sadly, as lame as they were, they were better written than LKH's books currently are. But they were pretty forgettable. I'd actually forgotten about them until now.

[cactus-wren.livejournal.com]

Well in that case I'll have to be ordering that book from the library! I like the character of Charles and was wishing there was more on him.

Thanks!

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

No problem. :)

[talymil.livejournal.com]

Actually...no. He's a handsome American rich guy whose with his brothers decide to create some freelance mercenary business and his mission takes him to the middle east (something to do with firearms) and the bad guy is all welcoming but it's obvious neither of them trust each other. So when "Judy" is sent in, whathisname thinks she's on it and she's doing it for the money.

Judy was in Egypt for a performance and she's kidnapped and is brought to the bad guy's place. When she meets american guy at first she's all "Hey maybe he'll believe me and help me" but that soon changes. But I think the only good bit in that book was when she tied him and threatened to stab him.

The book was a Mills and Boons and sadly when I started reading I was actually thought it might be good simply because it had a halfway original plot.

Currently I'm plugging in plot points into google to see if I can find the book.