So. Many, many years ago, I ‘fessed up right here to my addiction to self-help books. Later, I also disclosed my mercifully short-lived obsession with the Twilight books. Now, the time has come to reveal my latest literary infraction. Yes, I’m here to talk about the seething hotbed of lust that is the New Adult novel. This latest activity has ruined the credibility of my Amazon recommendations “Based On Your Browsing History” and means if anyone can see my screen, I have to open Amazon crouching over it like Pete Townshend doing ‘research’.
For the uninitiated, 1) make sure you stay that way 2) New Adult is the dirty bitch of Romance Fiction. Basically, chick lit with fewer laughs, no sense of irony and more semen. Mills and Boner, if you will. The magnum opus of the genre is the Holy Trinity of Fifty Shades, the slutty older sister of the Twilight series. EL James used to write BDSM Twilight fan fiction, then took those stories, aged all the character by about 5 years, took out the blood-sucking and the wolves and made history. I’ve never actually read the Fifty Shades books. I’ll always proclaim that this is because I’ve been advised that the prose is shriekingly bad, but given the utterly meritless crap I’m about to admit to having read, it’s probably more out of sheer obstinacy than anything else. Although I believe there are lots of mentions of “inner goddesses” and that pretty much makes me want to hurl. More on lady garden euphemisms later.
As in all things, you never forget your first, and my opening foray into these murky, badly-written waters was Beautiful Disaster by Jamie Maguire. Looking at my Amazon history, it’s not obvious what on earth provoked the order, but I think it must have been a recommendation. Thanks Amazon. Wankers. At time of writing, this book has 4 1/2 stars from 1,026 reviews. I thought I was in safe hands. Thanks reviewers. Wankers. My inclusion of this title is not an endorsement and I urge you not to read it. Think of it as me showing you a crime scene; it should not encourage you to commit a crime of your own. I ripped through the first third breathlessly, was confused and disappointed by the alarming sag in the second third and despaired of my very existence by the book’s conclusion. This is a pattern I would come to recognise. The book was absolutely fucking AWFUL and I tore through it in a day. And downloaded and tore through the sequel the very same evening. Yep, I was hooked all right. Book 2 was even worse. I would, eventually, read Book 3, but even I balked at paying for it and found it free on a dodgy download site instead. Fuck me, it was stupid. But still, I scrounged around Amazon like a fat kid craving doughnuts, trying to find a book that got the formula right.
Because the beauty of these books is the formula. Soothing in its predictability and simplicity of form. In the same way that I’d rather watch 5 episodes of CSI than an hour of The Wire (ok, I’d rather watch pretty much anything than an hour of The Wire), they’re light, disposable and blur into one with mind-numbing ease. Unfortunately, they’re also fucking awful and I long to be released from their grip. It’s starting to feel like a tortuous mythological quest (again, with more semen) where one day I will find The Good One and all the others, and their authors, will be cast into the furnaces of Hell to burn for all eternity. There must be a good one. There are absolutely thousands of them, so my work is cut out. Amazon has 7,303 New Adult novels on Kindle alone. There’s a lot written about the fact that women are far more likely to read porn New Adult fiction on Kindles as other people can’t tell that you’re reading Something Dirty. I’d happily flash porn all over the Tube without fear of judgement or reprisal, I just don’t want anyone to realise what badly-written drivel I’m reading. A girl has some limits.
Browsing this category is absolutely fascinating. As ever, Amazon makes it as easy as possible to home-in on exactly what you’re after and so we have the following sub-categories available within the genre:
So far, so weird. I mean, Love Triangle, Workplace, Second Chances I can just about understand. But International? Beaches?? Secret Baby??? That’s our 4th biggest category here. What’s hot about Secret Babies???? And who doesn’t love Amnesia porn? Does “Medical” mean ‘Hot Doctor’ or something more surgically sinister? So many questions…
But we’re about to go so much further down the rabbit hole. You can pick your hero as well. Brace yourselves:
Fucking Highlanders??? I’m not even really sure what a Highlander is. I do know that There Can Be Only One, yet we’ve got 33 of the fuckers screaming out to be read. Politicians outrank Firefighters??? WTF? And look how far “Wealthy” outranks everything else… As I’ll get into, my own experience actually pinpoints more mundane career choices (notable exception being the porn-star-turned-Navy-SEAL-turned-federal-agent. Yeah, that can happen in NA World).
So… without further ado, here’s Everything I’ve Learned From Reading New Adult Novels (So You Don’t Have To):
1) All NA books are set in the US, even when the vocabulary used makes it obvious that the book has been written by an English author. I think it’s because the characters will behave like complete morons for several hundred pages and we’re all very accepting of Americans being stupid.
2) All NA books are written by homely-looking housewives who live in a suburb of Bumfuck Nowhere. All power to them, but the fact that they spend their weekends ferrying their kids from Little League to Dennys whilst their husband paints the front porch does manifest itself somewhat offputtingly when they’re trying to describe hot dates between our couple. Any bawdy nights out clubbing appear to have been inspired by repeatedly watching the nightclub scene from Basic Instinct and everyone eats either steak or lasagne when they go out for dinner.
3) The story arc goes as follows:
First act – couple meet, they immediately lust after one another (especially if they hate one another), neither one of them is like anyone that the other has ever wanted before. Conflict prevents them from being together. Even if they have sex within the first 3 pages, Conflict will always intervene immediately. Which cues you up for:
Second act – Conflict is resolved. Couple definitively get it on. And on. And on. Everyone makes long term plans and looks forward to living happily ever after. Conflict then occurs AGAIN. This is sometimes the same Conflict from Act One that we, hapless readers, discover was not actually resolved after all or it can be an entirely new Conflict that’s been clumsily cobbled together because the formula demands MORE CONFLICT. In both instances, The Conflict only exists to increase the word count of the book and ensure that Make Up Sex occurs. This is usually where the book becomes beyond stupid and unravels. And we go hurtling towards:
Third act – Hero and heroine are separated by second act Conflict. Both are depicted as glamorously tormented during this period, furniture is nearly always broken and they may or may not have revenge/desperation sex with other people. Then The Conflict is resolved, effusive speeches about the complex vagaries of love are exchanged, everyone is a better person than they were before and everyone lives happily ever after. There’s usually a wedding or at least a proposal. In about 25% of all stories, the heroine is knocked up by now. Given that the average passage of time across the 3 acts is about 6 months – during which our lovers have only been together for collectively around 6-12 weeks – I find this a bit creepy. Is a laden uterus really the erotic culmination of all of our girlish fantasies? In any case, Act Three is where the book descends into utter bullshit and you start to question your very existence, possibly whilst throwing things and bleeding from the eyes.
4) Heroines always have normal, unexceptional names. Heroes have names that sound like the roll call in a Young Offenders Institute: Blake, Trey, Reed, Blaise, Tax, Rafe, Chasyn, Rider, Baylor, Stinger. There was one called Clive, but that’s equally ridiculous for entirely different reasons. To misquote When Harry Met Sally: “Give it to me… Clive”. I don’t think so.
5) The heroes have basically 7 jobs: student, athlete, bare-knuckle fighter, billionaire, musician, policeman, accountant. You can get combinations of these: students and accountants who bare-knuckle fight on the side, billionaire athletes and musicians, you get the idea. Billionaire NA fiction is a whole sub-category of its own. No measly millionaires for the NA crew, no way. Accountants are surprisingly prevalent in NA. I can only assume they’re considered the investment bankers of the mid-west.
6) All heroes have insane bodies and are described with 8-packs with boring regularity. Now, obviously, we’re all in favour of guys with insane bodies. I wouldn’t want to read about some clown with a beer belly and bandy knees. BUT, the non-athlete contingent of our heroes have achieved levels of ripped that would make David Beckham weep with inadequacy, whilst spending their entire time gazing lustfully at our heroine with nary a thought for the gym. I’ve spent WEEKS gazing lustfully at people in my time and it’s done jack shit for my abs. Are they secret bulimics??
7) Heroes have 3 haircuts (not each, between them): buzz cut (fighters), long hair (musicians) and an ill-defined haircut where “locks” fall over our hero’s eyes and our heroine longs to reach out and brush them away. The vast majority of NA heroes have this haircut and I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to look like. It sounds disturbingly like curtains. Incidentally, the guy on the front cover of the book will bear no resemblance whatsoever to the guy described in the book. I have no idea why this is.
8) Most heroes have a tattoo. Some have tattoos as a plot device (I promise). There’s a whole subset of NA involving aggressively muscular guys with full sleeves and piercings a-go-go, including an entire series of books called The Inked Brotherhood. Even I have too much self-respect to read those. N.B. Lip piercings will ALWAYS be “tugged” on by our heroine’s teeth whilst our hero moans “raggedly”.
9) The hero is always, always a total man-whore. He will have fucked approximately a billion women (Minimum. He’s probably fucked you), but all this has left him with is a deep feeling of emptiness, as well as killer skills in the sack. In spite of his prodigious promiscuity, he’s always used condoms (until he and the heroine don’t, in a beautiful and heartfelt moment) and does not have herpes. Not even a little bit of herpes. Upon meeting our heroine (who will have slept with 0-3 people), he promptly has the best sex of his life even though he’s regularly been beejed senseless by women who can swallow their own tonsils. All women who have slept with the hero, but are not the heroine, are sluts who wear cheap perfume, bodycon dresses and too much lipgloss. The heroine, in contrast, is 18-25, doesn’t really wear make-up, feels self-conscious in anything other than jeans and doesn’t know how beautiful and desirable she is. This is despite the fact that every man in the book will try it on with her, inciting the hero’s jealous ire.
10) The hero always, always has a dead or absent mother. If absent, she is always, always abusive and suffers from some sort of substance addiction. In the 0.5% of books where his mother is alive and adorable, he always, always has a dead girlfriend. This prevalence of dead women makes the hero brooding and tortured. Even if outwardly the hero appears carefree and happy-go-lucky, inwardly he’s brooding and tortured. Every time. This usually contributes to the inevitable First Act Conflict and enables the author to make our hero react to everyday situations in totally bizarre ways that defy the accepted norms of human behaviour. The heroine is always the only person who can reach him through this inner anguish and leave him “at peace”. The hero being “at peace” is a big deal in the NA novel, the physical manifestation of which is the hero gazing at the heroine through eyes that have become “unclouded pools”. They’ve usually previously been “stormy”. Yes. Stormy eyes. I don’t get it either and that brings me to:
11) There are a LOT of weather analogies. Torrents, cyclones, whirlwinds, storms, tempests, thunder. Maybe Ian McCaskill was the ultimate inspiration for all NA heroes. Volcano, tsunamis and oceans also come in for massive overuse. Curiously, every single NA novel, ever, will contain the phrase “Holy Hell”. I had never, ever heard this expression before but you can guarantee it will be slung across the page at some point. I sometimes think there’s only 1 author churning all of these books out. BURN THE WITCH.
12) The hero is almost always an absolute off-the-scale freaking genius. If not, he’s either:
a) painfully aware and tortured that he’s not particularly well-educated, but has an extraordinary talent for sport or art or music or similar. Our heroine soothes him by focussing on and nurturing this talent
or
b) a policeman (I swear I’m not making this up).
In NA, it’s fine not to be clever nor to have any discernible talent for anything if you’re a policeman. Incidentally, portraying the hero as a genius when the author of the novel is not exactly A Great Mind can lead to absurd results. The most prevalent examples of this are clunky insertions of Latin into the book, misspelled words or glaringly odd vocabulary. In my favourite ever instance, our heroine muses on first meeting our hero that, for a cage fighter (oh yes), he makes “interestingly intellectual word choices” and therefore has Hidden Depths. There’s actually been no evidence of his intellectual word choices in any of their conversations so far. Then, about 15 lines later on, he describes her having a stalker thus: “that doesn’t seem copacetic”. This literally comes out of nowhere. I had to google it to check that copacetic was even a word. It is, but it’s not a word that been used by anyone else, ever, in the history of the English language and he just drops it right in there. Oh… he’s deep. I get it. And she doesn’t even have to ask what it means. Gee, she’s smart too. Hilariously, the author then promptly forgets about the depths and our cage fighter doesn’t use a word of more than 2 syllables for the rest of the book. Which just isn’t copacetic.
13) You would not believe the number of supposedly white-hot demi-gods who wear khakis in these books. I mean, seriously. They’re then subsequently described erotically removing said khakis before launching themselves into our heroine’s lady parts. ALAN FUCKING PARTRIDGE WEARS KHAKIS. They might as well portray these guys seductively shrugging off a polyester cardigan.
All books also refer to “dress shirts”. As far as I can tell, a dress shirt is “a shirt” as all other possible derivations of shirt are described with dreary accuracy throughout the books. Abbreviated list: t-shirt, long-sleeved t-shirt, polo shirt, plaid shirt, sleeveless plaid shirt (all fighters own several of these. I have no idea why), tank (more prosaic than “wifebeater”), button down shirt, button up shirt. I’m not making this shit up, look at this lot getting into it. There is almost always a scene in which the hero picks the heroine up for a date whilst wearing a “dress shirt” as a declaration of monogamous intent.
14) When declaring monogamous intent with his penis, our hero will be entering our heroine’s “folds” (usually “soft”) that are either “velvety” or “silken”. The heroine also has a “core”, a “sex” and “inner walls”. Was there ever a less sensual phrase than “inner walls”? It evokes the inside of a bicycle tyre. Our lovers will say “pussy” but only when talking dirty to one another – which the heroine will at first do shyly, then with increasing confidence, which thrills our hero. Only one in every 30 heroes will ever say “cunt” and this is only to underline what a dirty, dirty, borderline-sex-criminal, depraved bastard he is. “Clit” is fine and is used with gay abandon until repetition dictates that the occasional “nub” is thrown in for relief. Men have “shafts” that are either “velvety” (yep, that word again) or “veined and ridged”. Mouths “crash”, tongues “lash” and our heroine is either “devoured”, “consumed” or “inhaled” by her paramour. Given that the books are, let’s face it, mainly about fucking, the vocabulary used to describe it is extraordinarily narrow and extremely consistent across all the books. However, NA authors do scour their collective thesauri for synonyms of “wet” and “shudder”. Sadly, the sex scenes are rarely even remotely hot, but they can usually be relied upon to provoke an absurd reaction from at least one of our 2 protagonists, and so the Conflict stutters on.
15) At some point during the Third Act, the hero Will. Start. Talking. Like. This. This is to demonstrate the depth of his emotions for the heroine And. Enables. Him. To. Convey. These. In A. Strangulated. Way. Whilst. He. Wrestles. With. His. Feelings. And. Tries. To. Overcome. His. Brooding. And. Tortured. Inner. Turmoil. He will also “roar” “YOU ARE MINE” into her face at some point, in a way that actually manages to be deeply creepy. The ultimate achievement is, of course, roaring “YOU. ARE. MINE.”, a well-worn trope of the genre.
16) Speaking of deeply creepy, approx. 25% of our heroes will demonstrate levels of controlling behaviour that should encourage a restraining order rather than weak-kneed lust. Virtually all NA will have the hero temporarily turning into a jealous lunatic after woefully misinterpreting another man’s intentions towards our bemused heroine at some point (Conflict!), but there are heroes who go so far beyond this as to become clinically insane. In the most extreme example, I spent the entire second half of the book waiting for the hero to be unmasked as a total psycho and for another hero to be whisked out from the wings in the third act when the psycho was incarcerated/committed. But no. Apparently smacking the shit out of her ex for no real reason, ripping up/off any clothes that he decided were not demure enough for public view and essentially seeking to control each of the most minute aspects of her life whilst dropping her like a stone if any minor act displeased him was #romantic. THEY GOT MARRIED. But, you know, he has a dead mother and is brooding and tormented. What’s a guy to do?
17) More often than not, the books come with a playlist of songs that inspired the author as she wrote each chapter. When I skim-read the list, having read some horrible, horrible book inspired by some horrible, horrible music (The Script, anyone?), I generally reach the deepest corner of my NA pit of self-loathing.
18) The final cliché that I’ll leave you with is a biggie. Originally a cynical cash cow, it’s now become almost standard throughout the genre. I’m talking about the dual-point-of-view novel(s). This is where the narrative voice switches between our heroine and our hero. Some authors shamelessly repeat entire pages of the book, just to describe the other character’s blinking from their perspective. It’s sold as “get inside the brooding, tortured mind of Hero X”, but these are mid-Western housewife authors, not psychologists or professors of gender studies, so the hero’s narrative voice is virtually identical to the heroine’s, he just swears more frequently and more creatively. That’s it. The narrative usually flips from chapter to chapter, but the most successful NA authors get away with writing a ‘sequel’ which is the same story as the ‘heroine’ original, regurgitated from the hero’s perspective. 2 books for the creative input of one. Double the royalties, half the integrity.
In summary: I implore you not to read them; I pity you if you’ve found yourself as captivated by them as I have. Now, enough with the writing. I’ve. Got. Some. Reading. To. Do.
Worth the wait Ammes!!