50 shades of grey by E.L. James....

[lapislzi]

18. it is both horrible and important.

Horrible, because the writing is, well horrible. Worse than horrible. I am a writer and I don't have words for how horrible this writing is. It is horrible because the writer is a horrible writer, and it is horrible because it has not been worked on by an editor, who may have made it slightly less horrible.

For those who don't know, this execrable series began its life as Twilight fan fiction. The books follow the Twilight story arc and character development (if you could call that vapidity any kind of "development.&quot As such, it is true to type. The protagonist is a vacuous young woman of indeterminate physical type--she could be anyone, and that is the point. She has no life, no interests of any kind. She is a cipher. All the better for the reader to project her own dimensions onto her.

By contrast, the male is hyperdeveloped to the point (and well beyond) of hyperbole.

So here we are with our non-story: a sexed-up version of Twilight.

And, why it is important: this is what book publishing is going to look like. Any idiot with an idea who can tap into a zeitgeist can make eleventy billion dollars just like that. This "book" started out as fan fiction, then moved to web page, then digital download, and finally got picked up by some tiny house in Australia. Now look. It's a goddamn empire.

This terrible, terrible writer, writes pornography (let's call a spade a fucking shovel, shall we?) that women want to read.

She's no Anais Nin, this E.L. James. But she has somehow figured out the right formula of vanilla kink from a female perspective, that women love. Men will not like this unless it causes their wives to request spanking or light bondage. The (bad) prose is all touchy-feely with our vapid heroine's confusion and hammering heartbeat (I wish I was kidding).

After the first two or three sex scenes (there are dozens), I started skipping them to find out whether there really was a story there. Um, there's not, unless you count the tired gender tropes lumbering across the pages.

But now we know: women will buy porn, even badly written porn, if it follows the right formula. And if they can discreetly read it on their Kindles.