Famous authors who were lousy at erotica

[Wifetheif]

I just finished a story called "Desert Blood" by Sam Walser, a nom de plume of Robert E, Howard of "Conan" fame. I found it in a reprint of the June 1936 issue of "Spicy adventure Stories" and with it, I have read all of Howard's output for the "Spicys" "Spicy" was the keyword back in the 30's for "adult" content. Pretty tame by today's standards, in its day, nothing hotter could be found on the newsstands. Most were sold under the counter and the blue-noses were constantly trying to shut them down. One used a Wilmington, Delaware post office drop to pretend that it wasn't located in New York and thus free of vice raids. Anyway, some of the stories still do the trick ... if you catch my drift. Others are great material to use as jumping off point for my own stories. To get to the point, Robert E Howard's "Spicy" stories SUCK! Everybody in the magazine is better than he is. Here is an example:

"She twisted over on her supple stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. There was no veil to hide her roguish features, her full, pouting lips, and the kohl darkened lids, which now drooped amusedly over dark eyes that sparkled with hidden meaning. Her gandourah, the robe worn by Algerian women, was a filmy wrap through which shone the warm ivory flesh beneath. Her broad girdle, drawn about her supple waist, outrageously emphasized the contours of her ripe hips as she lay there, one leg thrust out in a straight line, the other kicking up in a trip heel in the feminine joy of tantalizing a male, so the little crimson slipper barely clung to one saucy toe."

The rest is, if anything, WORSE! It is pretty clear to me that Robert E Howard had NO idea how the female mind operated. His sexless sex scenes (even considering the time they were written) convince me that the creator of the ultimate he-man, most probably, died a virgin. Other writers of the time pushed the envelope pretty far. In one story I read in "spicy" reprint. There was a small pearl fishing boat with a crew of four men and one of the guy's wives. Before the story was over, the woman had had sex will all of them! Risky for an author to try even today.

My main question is this: What other famous writers, quite skilled in one area, are complete flops in composing erotica?

Also there are authors who write very good books that succeed even with almost laughable sex scenes. This seems to me a very good topic of conversation.

 

[CyranoJ]

The Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards are a pretty useful guide to terrible erotic writing produced by otherwise good (or at least critically lauded) mainstream writers. My personal "favourite" recent winner is Morrissey, who's a superlative songwriter but whose erotic prose is hilariously abysmal.

“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.”

To be fair, it's not just the sex scenes in that book that raise an eyebrow. Morrissey is perhaps just not cut for fiction writing. A lot of the other Bad Sex in Fiction award-winners are otherwise solid fiction writers who basically seem to be suffering from either terminal cases of cliche or from being somewhat embarrassed about describing sex and going to absurd lengths to try to produce "original" scenes which are often just ludicrous.

 

[OliviaM]

That's fantastic. I've definitely read worse, though. Where did you find this stuff? Is it available online? And yeah, I'm pretty sure Howard died a virgin. I think he dated one girl for a while? He had kind of a closed-off, difficult life. He was a nerd before nerds were a thing. If only he knew the impact his writing would have on popular culture.

 

[CyranoJ]

Lots of terrible stuff is available online! The Interwebs are great at that...

I don't know if he qualifies as a good writer, BTW, but he was certainly a famous one in his day: Piers Anthony managed to shoehorn a fuck-ton of incredibly creepy and cringeworthy pederasty into his books, and I'm not someone who gets creeped out easily.

 

[Areala-chan]

Lewis Libby wrote a reasonably decent first novel called "The Apprentice" set in 1900s Japan, where a winter storm forces a large group of people from different classes and backgrounds into close proximity at an inn. There's considerable consternation at such a large gathering of folks in such a setting, as there's a plague sweeping the countryside, and everyone's afraid that someone infected will get in and spread it to the rest of them. There's hunting, murder, intrigue, and a lot of nice descriptions of the snow, the countryside, and the inn itself. It's actually not a bad story; not the greatest thing ever written, but it's a competent freshman effort.

The only thing anyone remembers it for is this line which, to quote Wikipedia, "combin[es] zoophilia, pedophilia, prostitution, biastophilia, and voyeurism in just three sentences":

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch.

Not exactly erotica at its finest, and Libby isn't an established author with a long track record, but jeezus, dude...

 

[Plane_Guy]

Ernest Hemingway.

 

[TamLin01]

It is pretty clear to me that Robert E Howard had NO idea how the female mind operated.

Well, yeah.

He wasn't really that up on most men's minds either. Howard had a pretty good understanding of Howard and not much else.

 

[Wifetheif]

That's fantastic. I've definitely read worse, though. Where did you find this stuff? Is it available online? And yeah, I'm pretty sure Howard died a virgin. I think he dated one girl for a while? He had kind of a closed-off, difficult life. He was a nerd before nerds were a thing. If only he knew the impact his writing would have on popular culture.

Very nice Reprints of "Spicy Adventure Stories," "Spicy Detective Stories" and the like can be found for very reasonable prices on Amazon. Everything is as it was in the 1930's except the back cover. Even the interior ads are reproduced. I'm a big fan of pulp fiction from the 30's Doc Save and The Shadow in particular. My interest in pulps led me to seek out the "hotter" stuff. Some of it still holds up today. There is also lots of misogyny and racism, but not always. There are some very nice interracial stories from time to time. E. Hoffman Price, who corresponded with both Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft is FANTASTIC! Just the right amount of sensuality and adventure to warm even the coldest night. Since Price specialized in "Spicy" fiction and the "Spicys" are not read much today, he has become an obscure figure. In his day, however, man did he sell magazines! There is a collection of his work for the Kindle that can be purchased for less than a buck on Amazon. His women are often more interesting than his men. Ancient princesses, wild, unexplored territory, strong virile he-men not all of whom are Caucasian. Like H. Rider Haggard, only with more sex. (At least a lot more than Haggard got away with) Price encouraged Howard to write for the Spicy Market and Howard encouraged Lovecraft to try the same thing!

As bad as Howard's erotic fiction was I can't even imagine what Lovecraft would have come up with!
Cthulu with a clitoris -- Now THERE is a scary image!

 

[Wifetheif]

Lots of terrible stuff is available online! The Interwebs are great at that...

I don't know if he qualifies as a good writer, BTW, but he was certainly a famous one in his day: Piers Anthony managed to shoehorn a fuck-ton of incredibly creepy and cringeworthy pederasty into his books, and I'm not someone who gets creeped out easily.

Piers Anthony is such a creep that regular perverts think HE'S a pervert!

How he gets away with what he writes is a supreme mystery. I think part of it is that he writes in fantasy and science fiction, so "Serious" critics don't know or care about him. He also has a reputation as a creep so once a creep always a creep. If a famous mainstream author tried to do what Anthony does regularly, the populace, armed with pitchforks and torches, would destroy the printing press and lynch the wordsmith.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Dashiell Hammett failed at erotica tho he knew the female mind.

My greatest surprise came from Tolstoy. Mediocre translators fail to capture his genius. Just yesterday I read a scene where a team of women toil to make an ugly woman pretty. And the ugly woman is obsessed about having sex but never will. Poor translators ignore plenty of sex in Tolstoy's writing.

Prolly the best erotica writer was John O'Hara who compressed sex scenes into dwarf sentences. Yet his little sentences reveal plenty.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

As someone who comes from a family close to actual old-school/olden days publishing, and then whose own father and mother were principals of teacher's colleges and even higher/more (I won't say because it 'might' start to pinpoint me) I can tell you I have personally met A LOT of big-name writers. Albeit this was when I was a VERY precocious - and I must say, smarter/wiser than I am now - young person.

Looking back, in consideration of the bs spiel I have heard over the years about this writer or that one, who had and often has still kept a reputation as some kind of sex guru or at least person highly knowledgeable about human sexual relations, I can tell you that exactly none of them impressed me as anything more than blowhards who would barely be given a 'pay-for' fuck by a prostitute!

With the following two exceptions: Munro Leaf who was a children's author. He was genuinely urbane and women liked him, that was clear.

And my own father's second cousin the utterly insanely indescribable Kevin McClory who wrote Thunderball.

I don't think McClory would have had ANY time in his life to do erotica - other than what he already had 'encouraged' from Fleming, which was supposedly mainstream for the public at that stage.

And I don't know about Leaf. What I know is he had good-looking women hanging off him. And that is all I know about that.

Anthony Burgess was the single biggest bullshitter I have ever met, EVER. But he was a complete blind drunk when I met him so I could be reflecting what he 'had become.'

The rest (most of) were all homey, homely, cardigan and slippers people, be they male or female. Some were flashy but that was all - they had no substance.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

As someone who comes from a family close to actual old-school/olden days publishing, and then whose own father and mother were principals of teacher's colleges and even higher/more (I won't say because it 'might' start to pinpoint me) I can tell you I have personally met A LOT of big-name writers. Albeit this was when I was a VERY precocious - and I must say, smarter/wiser than I am now - young person.

Looking back, in consideration of the bs spiel I have heard over the years about this writer or that one, who had and often has still kept a reputation as some kind of sex guru or at least person highly knowledgeable about human sexual relations, I can tell you that exactly none of them impressed me as anything more than blowhards who would barely be given a 'pay-for' fuck by a prostitute!

With the following two exceptions: Munro Leaf who was a children's author. He was genuinely urbane and women liked him, that was clear.

And my own father's second cousin the utterly insanely indescribable Kevin McClory who wrote Thunderball.

I don't think McClory would have had ANY time in his life to do erotica - other than what he already had 'encouraged' from Fleming, which was supposedly mainstream for the public at that stage.

And I don't know about Leaf. What I know is he had good-looking women hanging off him. And that is all I know about that.

Anthony Burgess was the single biggest bullshitter I have ever met, EVER. But he was a complete blind drunk when I met him so I could be reflecting what he 'had become.'

The rest (most of) were all homey, homely, cardigan and slippers people, be they male or female. Some were flashy but that was all - they had no substance.

I think of me as a natural philosopher of the Napoleon mold, Napoleon quizzed experts about much he shoulda learned at his military academy, he wasn't stupid, he simply wanted what he anhd the experts didn't know. Over the last 50 years I've studied sex and observed sex and had sex plenty of times, and doubt I know it all. I've known women who rejected me at 18, and couldn't get enough of me 10 years later. I suspect our road ready sexual appeal varies from JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED to ANY PORT IN A STORM...dependent on whazzup with out partners. When I'm dying of thirst a cold awful beer is divine.

So I depict the sex I've experienced. It was real, and its quality usually correlated with the time since the last sex.

 

[CyranoJ]

Blowhards are still plentiful on the writer's circuit -- I worked at a writer's festival for quite a few years -- but you'd actually be surprised at what kinds of writers can acquire "groupies." And at just how much fucking goes on within the literary community itself. (Of course no small amount of this is dudes exploiting supposed-mentor / bright-eyed-wannabe-writer dynamics to get young women who would otherwise never give them the time of day. But still.)

There are of course very distinct writer types: the frumpy ones who actually spend far more time writing than they do at parties; the glamorous ones of whom when they say "writing," it's chiefly ghost-writing that they have in mind; the young scenesters who are just learning to be writers and super-excited about things like author readings and being part of the "community;" the scenesters gone to seed and become bitter alcoholics; and rarest of all, the people who are genuinely both capable writers and urbane person-about-town sophisticates.

 

[lovecraft68]

but you'd actually be surprised at what kinds of writers can acquire "groupies." And at just how much fucking goes on within the literary community itself. (Of course no small amount of this is dudes exploiting supposed-mentor / bright-eyed-wannabe-writer dynamics to get young women who would otherwise never give them the time of day. But still.)
.

There's two of them here that I could name off the top of my head (meaning there's probably a boatload of them). One was even advertising on his bio page to meet women in his area to help with 'writing inspiration" this is also a person who proclaims other authors are jealous of them

The second one looks to use their stories to exploit naive young girls who don't know the difference between actual BDSM and abuse. That's a very common theme unfortunately especially on sites that are more specifically geared to that lifestyle. Predators are rampant on BDSM sites

IN the writers association I joined locally one of the authors approached my wife at an expo(she also signed up) and was telling her how successful he's been and that he'd be more than happy to help her succeed, but she'd have to 'be nice to him'

She mentioned it to another member who said "That was your official welcome to *** he's done it to every female author in the group.

After she told me I couldn't help going up to him and asking him if he could give me some tips and that if he did I'd "Oh, so grateful"

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Blowhards are still plentiful on the writer's circuit -- I worked at a writer's festival for quite a few years -- but you'd actually be surprised at what kinds of writers can acquire "groupies." And at just how much fucking goes on within the literary community itself. (Of course no small amount of this is dudes exploiting supposed-mentor / bright-eyed-wannabe-writer dynamics to get young women who would otherwise never give them the time of day. But still.)

There are of course very distinct writer types: the frumpy ones who actually spend far more time writing than they do at parties; the glamorous ones of whom when they say "writing," it's chiefly ghost-writing that they have in mind; the young scenesters who are just learning to be writers and super-excited about things like author readings and being part of the "community;" the scenesters gone to seed and become bitter alcoholics; and rarest of all, the people who are genuinely both capable writers and urbane person-about-town sophisticates.

Yep. Yep. Seems like pretty much the same as my own experience of things.

AND, I have also experienced what Lovecraft described about that sort of individual.

As far as the original proposition here - I am struggling to even KNOW of any mainstream writers who were known to have turned their hand to erotica (I mean I'm aware there are some, and in the back of my mind I might know who); nothing springs readily to my mind.

There is a theory that the erotic artist Rojan (Feodor Rojankovski) also wrote 'under the counter' porn stories, but I don't have any details about it at the immediate moment.

Oh, and MAYBE, Sax Rohmer. That's a possibility. And of course the very infamous whatsisname, Aleister Crowley, when he was young, in his twenties/thirties? Again, I'm just not anywhere near the kinds of libraries where I can source these items. But I think they're right. Crowley was real smart when he was young according to Wheatley, and then became morose and troubled later on.

I don't think you can go past the Earl of Oxford (De Vere, maybe Shakespeare) - there is every possibly he was an erotica writer and when you consider some of the more adventurous major plays, Shakespeare had some capacity in that arena straightout!

 

[Athalia]

I'd nominate Irving Wallace. A great story-teller, but his "erotic" scenes left me cold.Maybe I lacked the proper hormones to appreciate it, because other people have praised this aspect of his work.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As far as the original proposition here - I am struggling to even KNOW of any mainstream writers who were known to have turned their hand to erotica (I mean I'm aware there are some, and in the back of my mind I might know who); nothing springs readily to my mind.

Anne Rice. Going back a bit, does Richard Burton count?

I'm sure other mainstream writers have written erotica, but either (a) didn't link it to their "respectable" identities, or (b) avoided categorisation as erotica by including it as part of a broader story e.g. Jean Auel.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Very nice Reprints of "Spicy Adventure Stories," "Spicy Detective Stories" and the like can be found for very reasonable prices on Amazon. Everything is as it was in the 1930's except the back cover. Even the interior ads are reproduced. I'm a big fan of pulp fiction from the 30's Doc Save and The Shadow in particular. My interest in pulps led me to seek out the "hotter" stuff. Some of it still holds up today. There is also lots of misogyny and racism, but not always. There are some very nice interracial stories from time to time. E. Hoffman Price, who corresponded with both Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft is FANTASTIC! Just the right amount of sensuality and adventure to warm even the coldest night. Since Price specialized in "Spicy" fiction and the "Spicys" are not read much today, he has become an obscure figure. In his day, however, man did he sell magazines! There is a collection of his work for the Kindle that can be purchased for less than a buck on Amazon. His women are often more interesting than his men. Ancient princesses, wild, unexplored territory, strong virile he-men not all of whom are Caucasian. Like H. Rider Haggard, only with more sex. (At least a lot more than Haggard got away with) Price encouraged Howard to write for the Spicy Market and Howard encouraged Lovecraft to try the same thing!

As bad as Howard's erotic fiction was I can't even imagine what Lovecraft would have come up with!
Cthulu with a clitoris -- Now THERE is a scary image!

HPLovecraft was pretty much sexless. He wife described him as an "adequate lover" to a friend - about as damning as it got in those days. He had no insight into women - few of his stories mention any and I don't remember one mentioned in a good light. Maybe in dream quest. He wasn't any more racist than the rest of his era (at least not much?) but I lot of his writing springs from a kind of horror of otherness, and maybe that included women as well and blacks. His Shub-Niggurath, "the black goat in the woods with a thousand young", has been characterized as a sort of horror of female blacks and their reputed fundicity. He wasn't entirely alone. Planned Parenthood's origins date from this time and there's some evidence that part of the driving force behind it was to get other races to breed less. Eugenics was, after all, bordering on accepted science at the time. (The overt racism charge is disputed but some of the original papers and letters have an ugly sound to modern ears. On the other hand, people have tried to tie the founder to the KKK and failed; some of the claims are pure fabrication.)

R Howard... as best I can tell his stuff got some pulses pounding in his day, even though everything he did was laughable now. His heroes were virile, principled and deadly; his females were at least mysterious and some artists gave them nice boobs. Once upon a time that's all some people needed to get off.

When reading anything written before your adulthood, it is very important to understand historical context. It's not always easy.

 

[HeyAll]

As far as the original proposition here - I am struggling to even KNOW of any mainstream writers who were known to have turned their hand to erotica (I mean I'm aware there are some, and in the back of my mind I might know who); nothing springs readily to my mind.


!

As mentioned, Anne Rice is a massive selling author who wrote a series of erotic books.

Namely the Sleeping Beauty series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Beauty_Quartet#The_Claiming_of_Sleeping_Beauty

Originally three were written in the 80's, and there was a new addition added back in 2015.

They're available to browse in book stores. They'd been long forgotten, but since the popularity of 50 Shades, the book had been repackaged along with an intro from Anne Rice talking about how women shouldn't be ashamed for reading erotica.

Overall, the books are beautifully written and explore a number of taboos, such as age, bdsm, bisexuality. She's written a few other sex stories too. Not nearly as hardcore as stories you could find on Lit, but erotic nonetheless.

 

[Bramblethorn]

HPLovecraft was pretty much sexless. He wife described him as an "adequate lover" to a friend - about as damning as it got in those days. He had no insight into women - few of his stories mention any and I don't remember one mentioned in a good light. Maybe in dream quest.

Not even there. On a quick word-search of this version, the only reference I can find to a woman is "in Queen Anne's time". The word "she" appears just twice: once in reference to a boat, once in personifying New England.

He wasn't any more racist than the rest of his era (at least not much?)

Nah, HPL was pretty damn racist even by 1930s standards. Modern collections tend to sanitise him a bit, omitting or bowdlerising the worst bits, but there's plenty of it on the web.

One of his poems is, I understand, a popular .sig quote among Stormfront users.

In "Medusa's Coils", HPL suggests that it's bad enough when your wife turns out to be a witch whose long hair is actually a predatory being that slithers around independently and kills people, but the REALLY horrific thing would be discovering that she had a trace of Negro blood. (I've seen some versions that omit the last sentence, presumably the editors thought it was a little too blatant.)

P. Djeli Clark has a round-up of some of his letters, where he talks enthusiastically about massacreing Asiatics and Jews.

As you note, there was a lot of racism around in the 1930s; the Nazis were far less of an outlier than modern audiences might want to believe. But even by the standards of the day, and despite his Jewish wife, HPL was quite flagrantly racist.

(noting that "by the standards of the day" usually means "by the standards of white people of the day"; I doubt many Asians would've shared HPL's enthusiasm for gassing Asians, etc. etc.)

 

[CyranoJ]

Overall, the books are beautifully written and explore a number of taboos, such as age, bdsm, bisexuality. She's written a few other sex stories too. Not nearly as hardcore as stories you could find on Lit, but erotic nonetheless.

The Sleeping Beauty books (and also Exit to Eden) put E.L. James to shame in every way. It truly is a sin that 50 Shades has a freaking movie franchise and the closest Rice's erotica got to it is that profoundly misguided flop starring Rosie O'Donnell.

(For my money the Beauty books are actually quite hardcore in their way. The first one features a scene where Beauty gets gang-banged by the palace guard, for example. But they're a different and much more languorously paced approach to erotic material than a lot of readers would probably be used to.)

 

[Areala-chan]

A co-worker of mine recommended I read the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. When asked to describe the series, she explained the premise as something like, "What if the Prince who woke Beauty up was a sex-obsessed maniac who helped her discover her desire to be spanked and punished?"

I passed. Is there more to the books than this? Because, if not...WTF, Anne Rice?

 

[Bramblethorn]

A co-worker of mine recommended I read the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. When asked to describe the series, she explained the premise as something like, "What if the Prince who woke Beauty up was a sex-obsessed maniac who helped her discover her desire to be spanked and punished?"

I passed. Is there more to the books than this? Because, if not...WTF, Anne Rice?

That's pretty much it, yeah*. Young princes and princesses learn how to become better rulers by serving as BDSM slaves and getting spanked a lot. It's well written if you're into that sort of thing, but a bit too "and then another spanking!" for my preferences.

*at least, as far as I read, which was about halfway through book 2.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

A co-worker of mine recommended I read the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. When asked to describe the series, she explained the premise as something like, "What if the Prince who woke Beauty up was a sex-obsessed maniac who helped her discover her desire to be spanked and punished?"

I passed. Is there more to the books than this? Because, if not...WTF, Anne Rice?

I don't have any use for Rice's fiction - it seems to be written for a chromosome I do not possess. But the audience for women who discover either kinky sex or submission at the hands of a flawed but powerful (and sometimes ultimately good) male is not getting smaller. I gag mentioning it, but 50 Shades is evidence the genre is alive and well.

I kind of roll my eyes when women - or, funnier, men - roll their eyes at dark sexuality, humiliation, aspects of BDSM, or even pain for arousal's sake. I could write essays on what's good and bad about it all, but for pity's sake, talk to your friends about their turn ons. That last reputable study I saw said that about 4 women in 10 have a rape fantasy about once a month. Not reluctance fantasy. Not a BDSM spanking. Hardcore rape. Some of them report fantasizing they didn't like it, and then getting off to that. If you have 7 females friends under 40, I'll lay odds one of them wants to be spanked tonight and has fantasized about far darker things.

Doesn't make sense to you? You're not alone, given that 6 women in 10 presumably don't get it either. But for pity's sake, this is an erotica site. Most readers in noncon are women as far as I can tell (this is possibly a distorted sample set; even with my bio marked as Attached, women contact me far more than males ever do; but probably female writers get contacted by men, so who knows.)

I get the mental difficulty. I don't get GM sex. I can't fathom why anyone goes there. But the numbers say 5% of the population is homosexual. I know gay folk. GM lit is popular, some of it even among heretosexuals more wideband than I am. I don't get incest and mentally I like to categorize it as read and written by creepy fat guys in basements late at night. But that's simply not true. It's one of the biggest categories here and there exist women who basically get off to nothing else.

Accept what is. Sexuality is very, very strange. I'm spoken to a burly construction worker who wanted to get home and be walked on by women in high heels, including kicks to the genitalia. I know women who want to be raped at knifepoint, except not really, but...

The thing about writing here is that you'll be contacted by readers. Some of them worry me, but they all have a sexuality and a story to go with it. Unless they're hurting children or puppies, try not to judge.

 

[Areala-chan]

No judging, per se, other than the confirmation that I was clearly not her target audience for such a series. I'm hardly one to pass judgement, considering I write for both Lesbian Sex and Incest/Taboo here and am a lesbian myself.