The nights are drawing in, Christmas is on its way…which means only one thing: time for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards!
From Morrissey to Giles Coren, the annual awards basically do what they say on the tin: they celebrate really, really bad sex writing. In 2015, Morrissey’s description of an erect penis as a “bulbous salutation” became a horrible, horrible meme; Ben Elton, Salman Rushdie and Stephen King have also been shortlisted.
This year’s entries are equally horrifying. Exhibit A: War Cry by Wilbur Smith.
“‘I’m going to have you now,’ Leon said. He led her back up the beach to where the sand was dry. Then he took off his coat, placed it on the ground and she lay down upon it.
‘Christ!’ he muttered, placing himself on top of her. ‘It’s bloody cold. I might get frostbite on my cock.’ She gave a low purring laugh. ‘Silly man. Why don’t you put it somewhere hot?’”
Which is profoundly disturbing all round, especially when you realise Wilbur Smith is literally eighty-four years old.
Here are some other corkers from past awards.
The Quiddity of Wilf Self by Sam Mills
“Down, down, on to the eschatological bed. Pages chafed me; my blood wept onto them. My cheek nestled against the scratch of paper. My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic.”
Noughties by Ben Masters
“We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amonst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other’s bodies for every inch of history.”
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
“Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw — all this without a word.”
Rare Earth by Paul Mason
“He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum, but missing — his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down.”
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.”
From The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis
“This is not pleasurable. How could anyone find having burning hot candle wax dripped onto the flesh of their belly pleasurable? But I don’t want to tell her to stop cos the last time I told her to stop I got belted in the mouth. She wears an average of three rings on each finger. God, Mum was right, this lousy settee does stink. No wonder Dad’s in hospital. I might well be joining him by the end of the night.
I think I’m still inside her but, quite honestly, it’s difficult to tell …
Avanti!
“You fucker!” she drawls, and brings the flame up close to my left nipple. “You pathetic little fucker,” and tries to light it like a wick.
“Ooowwww!” Oh shit, my nipple’s on fire. She’s poured lighter fluid onto my chest and my tit’s gone up in flames like some dessert in a posh restaurant.”
From Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
“You wanna pop me?” she said. This must have been some new-fangled youth term. The verb “to pop.”
“I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty,” I said. “I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let’s do this thing.”
List of the Lost by Morrissey
“At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
From Apples by Richard Milward
“She had on no knickers, and my heart went crash-bang-wallop and my eyes popped out. She hadn’t shaved, and her fanny looked like a tropical fish or a bit of old carpet.”
The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro by Paul Theroux
“The softness of her skin in the dark, far softer-seeming because of the dark, was irresistible. And the aroma of her lily-fragrant perfume mingled with the cat smell of her steaming cunt made me salivate and pant like a lion, my nose tormented by damp fur and hot blood. Still I could not tell where her soft skin ended and her silk began, and the complexity of her vaginal lips was like another elaborate silken garment she had put on for me to stroke. I adored the gleam of her body in the light from the … streetlamps and the blistered moon… She knelt and worshipped my cock with her mouth and her gloved hands and she cried out louder than I did when I came, spattering her face as she licked.”
The Big Kiss: An Arcade Mystery by David Huggins
“’Stick it in’, she whispered. I moved up the bed and pushed inside her. Liz squeaked like wet rubber. She grabbed my love-handles and ground her hips against me, her eyes black saucers staring into mine as she hooked a yoga-leg onto my shoulder. We went through a medley of our favourite positions. When Liz saw that I was about to shoot my blob of Lo-Cal genetics she turned onto her stomach, lifting her arse to get a hand to her clitoris and chase me to an orgasm. She made it just in time.
We lay panting with the sweat cooling on our bodies.
Things were better between us after that but it didn’t last long.”
Kissing England by Sean Thomas
“It is time, time … Now. Yes. She is so small and compact and yet she has all the necessary features … Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou art more compact and more – She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa … Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh …”
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet
“He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: ‘I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy …’
Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: ‘Let’s construct an assemblage.’”
