Beauty Flog!

[nightmer.livejournal.com]

For those that aren't aware, "Beauty" is LKH's latest work. It boasts a stunning 2.1 stars on Amazon. As it says on the summary page:

32 reviewers aren't wrong. This is literally one sex scene that was rejected from being added to the published books, coupled with some of LKH's cut-and-paste backstory in case you can't keep track of all the bland men in Anita's life.

  

Even the cover labels it an "outtake" which apparently means, "we didn't know what to do with this so we decided to see if people would pay $2.99 to download it it."  No excuses yet for why Anita is apparently a brown-haired blue-eyed unscarred  tan-but-white lady.  I kind of like the cover, though.  It's not pretending that anything is happening in this story but everyone lounging around and focusing on Anita.  Plus, the writing superimposed over her chest makes it look like they just said "fuck this book, I don't even care" and stole an image off a stock photo site.
    
    

   In any case, if you don't feel like slogging through the 33 pages yourself, here's a summary and some choice excerpts!   
  

    

"Once upon a time I’d had no one to go home to after a crime scene, but that was back in the day when I’d done nothing but hunt bad guys and raise zombies."  

 
LKH really shouldn't have started off reminding us all that Anita used to do more than let her boyfriends fawn over her, but there you go.  No bad guys in sight in this story.  We open as Anita is cleaning herself up from work to get ready for the really interesting part of her life: bathing with a few of her sweeties.
  

"People could die if I missed this job, but there were nights when I just needed to come home and wrap myself in my boyfriends’ arms and forget about the blood and death I’d just seen. This was one of those nights, and according to the schedule, I was coming home to Jean-Claude, the master vampire of St. Louis, and one of my main squeezes. We’d been dating for seven years, sometimes on-again, off-again, but for the last few years it had been very on."  
 
Scheduling time with her main squeezes.  Reuse your exposition much, LKH?
 
"I’ve always had better luck dating the 'monsters' than the humans. Some people say that’s because I’m one of the monsters. Some days I think they’re right, but other days I think they’re just jealous whiner babies."
 
The infamous line (emphasis mine).  I still can't believe this showed up in a published work.  LKH, tell us how you really feel about the haters.  I think what annoys me the most is Anita had just as many critics when she was a celibate, law-abiding, non-rapist, badass monster-killing chick, but now she just insists that anyone who disagrees with her just doesn't like the idea of women getting laid.
 

"Some people, including other women, still think we should be waiting for Prince Charming so we can ride off into the sunset of happily-ever-after-land. This was one princess who could rescue her own damn self. I was fine with the prince fighting at my side, or, hell, I’d rescue him if he needed it. But I was so not the passive, wait-for-my-one-true-love type, and wonder of wonders, I’d found several men who loved me for being the stubborn, messy, violent, sexually-aggressive woman that I am. In fact, they totally encouraged that last part."  
 
It's not an Anita Blake book if we don't get some girl-hate in.  There isn't a single female besides Anita in the entire story and she still needs to stop and dwell on those annoying jerks who just wish they had her men.  And this argument would play better if Anita hadn't solved almost every problem in the latter half of the series with the help of her magical vagina that takes away her - and her victims - ability to choose or not choose sex.  As usual, Anita holds herself up as the model of a sexually and socially liberated woman by slamming anything non-masculine, conveniently forgetting anything that doesn't agree with her strict view of herself, and still managing to sound insecure without a group of men telling her she's pretty and special.
  

Then we start off with a description of Jean-Claude in case you'd forgotten he was the one with eyes that are "blue like deep ocean water, where it runs cold and will eventually spill down into something warm and mysterious" and "truly black" hair like Anita, plus a run-down of scars, history of the scars, and a reminder that he thinks Anita is the most beautiful beauty, ever. He reads the doubt in her mind and they discuss that for a while:
 
"To have this amazingly lovely man tell me I was beautiful, and mean it, was like some kind of miracle, or karmic balance for all the people who had made me feel less than beautiful, as if I’d done my time in ugly-duckling hell and woke up to realize I was truly that graceful swan after all."  
 
Except she's been on the same old issues for how many books now?  Anita, I don't think you've actually realized anything - you're rehashing the same old same old with no character development.  In any case, that concludes LKH's attempt to tie the story to the title, unless you think Anita getting repeatedly choked by cock underwater is beautiful.

Then "[Asher] came forward in his painted-on blue satin pants tucked into knee-high boots. The cutaway tailcoat was blue, too, and all of it made his palest of blue eyes bluer still, like early spring skies instead of winter blue. His eyes were as pale a blue as Jean-Claude’s were dark."  Six repeats of the word "blue" in three sentences.  Editor?

Some choice dialogue:
      “'I just wasn’t sure how soon you’d be coming, that’s all.'
      'Oh, I’ll be coming, but not too soon.' He undid the cuffs of his shirt. It took me a moment to get the double entendre, and when I did I blushed." Sigh.

Then we get some more backstory on the boys and how they feel about Anita.  "The possibilities with both Asher and Jean-Claude in the tub with me were almost endless."  Spoiler alert: they bang.

      “'Who’s topping whom tonight?' Asher asked in a voice that had already gone slightly lower. He gazed at me, half lost in the water, then back to Jean-Claude, bare-chested and so close.
      'I thought we’d top ma petite together,' Jean-Claude said."  Time for some more awkward LKH-style BDSM!

      "He still hadn’t taken blood from me, so he was limp and as small as he got as I sucked and rolled my mouth over him. I loved the feel of a man before he got big, and with most men a little oral sex and they were anything but little almost immediately. But until a vampire took blood there wasn’t enough blood pressure to have that wonderful change of texture and size, so I could suck to my heart’s content without it turning into a challenge to breathing around something much too big to go down my throat that far. I loved deep-throating, but my body didn’t always like not being able to breathe."
 
I swear I've seen this paragraph word-for-word in earlier books.  Or at least the exact sentiment.  Less than 33 pages of story and paragraphs are still being reused?  And people are being charged for this?

      "Jean-Claude had chosen to watch. He’d said, 'I want to watch his face as you pleasure him, knowing he has no release until he takes blood from you.'
      It so totally worked for me.
      I felt the water move around me, sloshing and caressing my body, and knew before hands touched me that Jean-Claude had grown tired of watching and was about to join us. That totally worked for me, too."  Like, totally.  Totes.

      "Asher caught me around the waist, and his body was hard and ready. Jean-Claude had time to push my mouth over him, but he wasn’t small; he was already growing bigger as my mouth slid over him, with his hand still wrapped hard and fast in my hair, until it almost hurt, was almost too much. He’d rinsed in the water, but I could taste myself on him, and faintly him."  
 
Here's one of those paragraphs where you realize that LKH's editor really has just left the building.

      "[Jean-Claude] began to work his finger in and out of me until I made small helpless noises around Asher’s body, as if he were a living gag.

      'Mon Dieu.' Asher breathed it out almost in a sigh.

      'If you complain, I won’t let you have release,' Jean-Claude threatened, and his voice held that edge of darkness that the rare moments of sadism reared.

      I watched the look of surprise on Asher’s face as he looked at him, as if he couldn’t believe Jean-Claude meant it, but whatever he saw on the other vampire’s face convinced him, because he said, 'I will not complain.'

      “Good,” he said, and then he made his fingers go in and out of me faster and faster, as if he were fucking me with them. The combination of Asher in my mouth and Jean-Claude’s fingers between my legs brought me screaming with my mouth pressed as tight against the front of Asher’s body as I could get.

      He cried out above me, and I knew he wasn’t having orgasm with me, because he couldn’t, but the vibrations of my screams bowed his neck, made his hands clutch at the towels he was sitting on. 'Please, Jean-Claude, please,' he begged.

      'No.'

      Jean-Claude raised my hips higher up in the water, until I was on my feet. I started to raise my face up, but Jean-Claude’s hand pressed the back of my head, keeping me where I was. 'Hold her in place, your body is her gag while I fuck her. If she moves from your body I will deny you release tonight.'"  
 
This is a really funny scene to picture.  Lots of contorting.

"Asher was all out of patience, because he began to fuck me as fast as he could, finding a hard, fast rhythm, so that our bodies smacked together with a thick, meaty sound. Water was splashing up around us, drenching me and almost them.

Jean-Claude had done too much prep work and I orgasmed almost immediately, screaming my pleasure around Jean-Claude’s body as he pushed himself as far down my throat as he could go. And then there was no more screaming, because there was no more air to scream with."  
 
Basically, everything makes Anita scream and everything makes Anita orgasm.  There is nothing in this scene we haven't seen plenty of times before.  LKH displays her talent at making kinky sex seem dull and repetitive.
 

      "'I am close,' Asher said in a hoarse, deep voice.

      'Together,' Jean-Claude said. 'But pause.' Asher buried himself as deep inside me as he could, but he stopped moving. Jean-Claude let me come up far enough to breathe, and asked, 'Are you all right with our game, ma petite?'

      I took two gasping breaths and said, 'Yes, very yes.'

      He smiled at me, and then forced my head back down the hard, thick length of him, until he was buried deep down my throat and I had to swallow him down because he gave me no choice."  
 
While I suppose it's nice that LKH is trying to show consent when her main character is being sexily smothered, it's just a reminder that all three of these characters think it's totally fine to enspell or just plain bully other people into having sex against their will with Anita, because Anita is one of the good guys.

      "Jean-Claude leaned over and they kissed, long and tenderly, and then Jean-Claude kissed me just as thoroughly and tenderly. Asher kissed me last, his tongue licking my lips, and I knew he was tasting that saltiness that was Jean-Claude.

      'Thank you, ma petite.'

      When I could talk, I managed to whisper, 'My pleasure.' And it had been."  
 
And that's it.  That's the whole story.  Except it's not a story because there literally is NO plot.  Anita and JC and Asher want to fuck in the tub.  Anita and JC and Asher fuck in the tub.  And they tell her she's pretty for a bit because there needed to be an excuse for the title. (Too bad LKH isn't naming each book after a location any more.  I'd be a lot more entertained if this whole thing was called "Jean-Claude's Bath Tub.")  But that's the scene.  Even the most die-hard fan couldn't argue that this contains any relevance to a plot or further character development - it just exists.

The annoying thing is this wasn't an awful a scene as many.  LKH has cut down on the sexposition and at least there's not 12 bland-but-supposedly-each-sexy-in-their-own-sexy-way men hanging around discussing their feelings and what they want to do during sex and how it will give them a magical power up and how much Anita is better than all those other women.  If LKH had an editor that would actually edit and a publisher that would try to churn out quality, rather than wring more money from a failing franchise, this might have made a good addition to a book, if it was cut down by about 20 pages and someone removed all the awkward, unsexy phrasing.  But instead we have this.

In conclusion, for the 33 pages -

LKH overused word tally:
Tight: 2
Wet: 3
Spill: 4
Beauty: 9
Scream: 14

Orgasm tally:
Asher: 1
Jean-Claude: 1
Anita: 6

Comments

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

I love that most UF covers have the heroine in an active (if improbable) pose with a gun or whatever, and LKH's books have Anita sprawled on the floor.

[momentsplinter.livejournal.com]

I'd be a lot more entertained if this whole thing was called "Jean-Claude's Bath Tub."

I lol'd.

[zombiegoat.livejournal.com]

There's several things that tick me off about all of us, but I will just stick to two points.

1) As many people said, this should have been given away for free. It's common practice for an author to spill the beans on the first chapter of an upcoming work on their website as a download in order to pique some interest. Some authors go a step further, and put larger amounts of downloadable content out there as a thank-you to their fans. If LKH wants to charge a buck for this, I guess it's a free country and she can do so... but three dollars for 33 pages? Extrapolate that to the usual length of a novel and it sets a price tag of about thirty dollars for the full work... at Kindle prices. The price-to-content ratio here is hopelessly out of whack and sadly, it doesn't even seem to be much good, besides.

Which leads directly to point #2...

2) Goddamnit, remember when LKH was good? And honestly, remember when calling her "good" was selling her short? She was great. The first nine books of the Anita Blake series were about as good as anything else I've read in modern fantasy. That's what makes this even more painful; it's not like we're talking about Danielle Steele here, who has been crap since day one and hasn't changed in forty years. She was awesome out of the gate, and I think sometimes we forget that given how things have gone lately.

Somewhere at the turn of the millennium, LKH went batshit with the ardeur storyline and hasn't looked back since. Oh, and incidentally, exactly when is that fucking albatross going to be given a decent burial? LKH said it was a storyline with a point and would have an ending, but we're now eleven books into that particular plot bunny, and it shows no signs of keeling over and dying. If anything, it appears to be picking up steam.

Anyway, rant #213 off.

[mocha-latta.livejournal.com]

I'm all about the eroticism of more than Cocks As Hard As Steel, and Tight, Wet, Pure Pussies in porn, because among other things, it reduces people to a very strict series of body parts, so I like the idea of Anita enjoying her partners' bodies when they're not erect, HOWEVER the way that LKH describes it makes me picture a wrinkly worm. It's just not erotic to me at all.

[bloodwings1.livejournal.com]

"He still hadn’t taken blood from me, so he was limp and as small as he got as I sucked and rolled my mouth over him. I loved the feel of a man before he got big, and with most men a little oral sex and they were anything but little almost immediately. But until a vampire took blood there wasn’t enough blood pressure to have that wonderful change of texture and size, so I could suck to my heart’s content without it turning into a challenge to breathing around something much too big to go down my throat that far. I loved deep-throating, but my body didn’t always like not being able to breathe."

I swear I've seen this paragraph word-for-word in earlier books."

I'm pretty sure that's almost exactly word-for-word in The Killing Dance. The downward spiral of her writing has never been more apparent.

[everstar3.livejournal.com]

then he made his fingers go in and out of me faster and faster, as if he were fucking me with them

I'm pretty sure that when someone is thrusting his fingers faster and faster in and out of one of your orifices, he is actually fucking you with them. There's no "as if" about it. Criminy. Also, does Anita know you can suck guys off without them having to face-fuck your uvula? You're not required to cram them down past your gag reflex.

Ugh, this sex is so dull. I think the worst thing about it is that it really highlights how static they all are as characters. What about this scene makes it unique to this book? I swear it could have taken place in any novel where the three of them were banging.

[muggins.livejournal.com]

I just downloaded the thing. Took me about five days to slog through the terrible writing! I stopped buying the books after Incubus Dreams came out... Now LKH has my download or library fare... eventually I'll get them used. I don't want to give her anymore money -_-

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Getting my mod hat on - can you either shrink the cover image or put it behind a cut so we can save our f-lists, please?

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

So, does she not know how to breathe through her nose?

[kynekh-amagire.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD LKH SAY "PENIS" PLEASE. This coyness about specific anatomical reference needs to stop. Mostly because:

"Hold her in place, your body is her gag while I fuck her. If she moves from your body I will deny you release tonight"

"screaming my pleasure around Jean-Claude’s body as he pushed himself as far down my throat as he could go"

"I made small helpless noises around Asher’s body, as if he were a living gag"

"I felt the water move around me, sloshing and caressing my body"

LKH, by using "body" instead of the more reasonable "cock", you seem to have implied that Anita has a dick. Which... would actually make me like her a little bit more as a character, but I really doubt that was your intent. Also, I realize that every sex scene is written exactly this way, but the fact that everyone Anita (or Merry) fucks seems to take "screaming wordlessly and clawing hard enough to break skin" as encouragement just makes me hate everyone in these books.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Well... the cover model is gorgeous. /can't say anything nice

[poor-toms-acold.livejournal.com]

I’d found several men who loved me for being the stubborn, messy, violent, sexually-aggressive woman that I am.

Except she's not sexually-aggressive at all. Everyone else is always making her decisions for her/holding her in place/etc. She has an aggressive, dominating personality, but she's not sexually aggressive.

I can't believe I even cared enough to type that. Except yeah, LKH gets sex wrong and makes it boring. Also why wasn't this an entire chapter of just Jean-Claude and Asher banging? Give the people* what they really want!

*Both the audience AND Jean-Claude and Asher.

[cheeky-duckie.livejournal.com]

Am I the only person who finds the word "scream" completely non-erotic? I willing to say hey, different strokes and all that -- but the noise I hear in my head is not the happy fun noises of a woman in a vampire sandwich.

But I think this was my favorite (other than 'jealous whiner babies,' of course):

“Good,” he said, and then he made his fingers go in and out of me faster and faster, as if he were fucking me with them.

Yes, Anita. That is exactly what's happening there. It's like no one has ever told her the phrase "finger fucking."

Also: that sentence has a lot of "and" for one declarative.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

I am so glad she got in all that backstory about how she's not a pwetty pwetty princess awaiting Prince Charming and who everyone is, because as a reader of her books picking up a deleted scene I could not be expected to know that.

jealous whiner babies How *old* is Anita? I mean, OK, we all know she's pushing 50 due to her fashion being stuck in 1987, but in text? Is she 14?