Nominees Announced for the 2019 'Bad Sex in Fiction' Award

Since time immemorial (well, 1983, anyway), people have been reading AVN to figure out which adult movies they might want to see, helped in that endeavor by AVN reviewers who watch all the bouncing bodies and assess whether Pole A going into Slot B is actually worth a look. However, there appears to be no similar magazine/website dedicated to informing readers which novels have the best (or in this case, worst) sex scenes. Enter the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Created in 1993 by then-editor Auberon Waugh of the UK's Literary Review and critic Rhoda Koenig, the pair got tired of having to wade through exhaustive catalogs of all the gymnastics, moans, descriptions of interlocking parts and transcribed cries of delight (or something) to be found in novels published during the preceding year—so why not do readers a favor and call attention to the worst of them? According to an article in the UK's The Guardian newspaper, the Bad Sex In Fiction Award is given to "the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel," and is intended to draw attention to "the poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction." And there's a lot of them! Before getting to this year's nominees, perhaps it's worth a look back at some previous "prize" winners ... like 2017's winner, Christopher Bollen (an American!) for his book The Destroyers. Bollen describes a sex scene between a guy and his former girlfriend that takes place on a Greek island, writing, "She covers her breasts with her swimsuit. The rest of her remains so delectably exposed. The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles." Hot stuff, eh? Certainly "better" than Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language ("Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a steel forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine"); or Venetia Welby's Mother of Darkness ("The green grass curls around Tera’s left breast as she curves her sleek physique around Matty’s diabolical torso like a vine. Paralysed, complete, the marble statue of the lovers allows itself to be painted by the dawn’s lurid orange spillage."). Apparently, 2018's winner was somewhat easier to pick: James Frey's Katerina, which had several scenes that attracted the judges' attention, with the following being the most notable: "I’m hard and deep inside her fucking her on the bathroom sink her tight little black dress still on her thong on the floor my pants at my knees our eyes locked, our hearts and souls and bodies locked."Cum inside me."Cum inside me."Cum inside me."Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one."One."White."God."Cum."Cum."Cum."I close my eyes let out my breath."Cum."I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles." Who couldn't get off on that? Certainly better than Gerard Woodward's The Paper Lovers ("Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready") or Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St. John Trevelyan's Scoundrels ("Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey."), right? But 2019's list looks like a toughie. The judges will have to select from such sterling attempts as The River Capture by Mary Costello ("He clung to her, crying, and then made love to her and went far inside her and she begged him to go deeper and, no longer afraid of injuring her, he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection.") or The Office of Gardens and Ponds by Didier Decoin ("The earthy taste surprised her. When he was alive, when it swelled inside Miyuki’s mouth, Katsuro’s penis had tasted of raw fish, of warm young bamboo shoots, and of fresh almonds when she finally released its juices. Now it was insipid and muddy to her tongue, like the pools of the temples of Heian Kyō when the Office of Gardens and Ponds had them drained for cleaning.") or The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith ("The actual lovemaking was a series of cryptic clues and concealed pleasures. A sensual treasure hunt. She asked for something, then changed her mind. He made adjustments and calibrations, awaited further instruction. For most of the proceedings he felt his own desire as if it were tethered to a wire, a bright red balloon floating in his peripheral vision, but eventually he burst through. It was toward the end, as their breathing quickened. Her stage directions had stalled out into silence. He looked to his right and noticed the scene in the smoky lens of the mirror above the bureau, saw his own body move with the steady rhythm of a bellows blowing air at the base of a fire. It brought back the early experiments at the photographic society in Paris, the wiring of a bird’s feet to a cameragun, the mounting tension and uplift before a surge of exasperated flight.") There are a few more 2019 entries, which can be found here, but all we can say is, we wouldn't want to have to choose from that bunch—though we can picture a couple of fledgling porn scripters who might find inspiration there.