Help A Bitch Out - SOLVED!

HaBO: It’s Sparkly. No, Not His Skin.

You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!

This request comes (hur) from Cate. And I cannot even. No, really. Absolutely no evens can be, due to this request, which… oh, please, just read it:

I have a dozen things I should be doing, so NATURALLY my brain has decided to obsess about a category romance that I read in (I think) the mid-90s. It was from one of the “hot” lines, so maybe Silhouette Desire or Harlequin Temptation? I think the spine and edge-bits of the front cover were red.

The hero was an alien.

Possibly a shape-shifting giant cat.

The one part I really really remember (and you cannot imagine how horrified I am at myself. SELF, REALLY: what is wrong with you?) is that they had sex on the balcony outside and afterwards she realized his Special Man Juices were glittery.

No, really. There was glittery spunk in this book.

Please help me identify the source of GlitterJism Alien Cat-man so I can stop googling combinations of those words.

Cate emailed me a bit more information as well:

God, I hope someone else remembers this book. For one thing, googling variations of “sparkling jizz cat alien” is bringing me to some bad, bad places on the internet.

Additional details: I remember she had his sparkle!jizz on her fingers when she noticed it sparkled. (I can’t remember where he was at that moment, but I *think* he’d gone back to the stars/his planet/his ship.)

Also a biggish deal was made out of the balcony sex because it was under the night sky and he came from Up There Somewhere.

 

If this is a Harlequin, I will be VERY surprised. And if it is, and it’s a continuity, I MUST READ IT IMMEDIATELY. Do you recognize this book?

Update: SOLVED!

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  1. Tamara Hogan says:

    I can’t specifically remember a balcony scene, or glittery jizz, but Dara Joy’s “Knight of a Trillion Stars” and “Rejar” both have alien cat-men.  The originals were published in the late ‘90’s by Lovespell, but Joy self-published the books again earlier this year.

  2. This could be Mallory Rush’s Kiss of the Beast. Harlequin Temptation from the early 90s featuring alien hero, scientist heroine and the first I ever so vague references to “knotting” during sex.

  3. Ugh. Sorry for the incoherence. I meant to say it was also the first book I remember making a vague reference to the hero “knotting” during sex.

  4. azteclady says:

    This has to be a Cheryl Brooks cat something or other book…

  5. Diane/Anonym2857 says:

    Kiss of the Beast was my first thought also. Interesting what we find memorable in a book.  I don’t remember glittering sperm, but I DO remember that when he goes down on her, his tongue goes all the way up internally.  Like past the cervix and to the very upper wall/roof (?!)  Of the uterus. Blink.

  6. azteclady says:

    Check the plots for Outcast or Hero, from Cheryl Brooks’ Cat Chronicles.  (All found at Fantastic Fiction, adult)

  7. denise says:

    holy cow, I mean cat!

  8. Sarah S says:

    The amazing thing is that, apparently, there’s more than one possibility for this.

  9. Jace says:

    I remember reading one of my mom’s category romances of an illiterate lady who met a super hot guy who was an extraterrestrial. Turns out she’s an alien, too (that’s the reason that she can’t read English words), and I remember that they were both sparkly when they returned to their homeworld. I dunno if there was glittery jizz, though. And I dunno the title, too.

  10. Vasha says:

    Huh. And here I was boggled, when going through a box of 90s Silhouettes, to find one where the heroine is an alien (“Out-of-This-World Marriage” by Maggie Shayne. Actually the cover copy unintentionally makes it sound like she’s only pretending to be an alien, which would be more interesting really.) So aliens were actually a thing in multiple 90s categories? Are they still?

  11. Jenica says:

    Try Topaz Dreams by Marilyn Campbell. Futuristic romances before the world discovered urban fantasy!

  12. Vasha says:

    And oh yeah, conoisseurs of covers might appreciate this one from the same box—I found it a bit alarming, both because she’s distracting him while he’s working with a knife, and because I think the headband went out of fashion well before the 1996 publication.

  13. Robin says:

    Dara Joy’s “Mine To Take” was also about a cat-man.

  14. Dana says:

    This sounds a lot like The Rebel Prince by Nina Bruhns.

  15. Elinor Aspen says:

    I wonder if the authors of all those 90s category romances involving aliens had fond memories of the Jeff Bridges movie Starman.

  16. Holly Bush says:

    This thread is hilarious! I have to say that while I haven’t the foggiest idea what the name of the book could be, I truly enjoyed the description and the conversation about it. I don’t think I know what knotting is and I’m afraid to google it and I’m also interested in how many slang variations there are for sperm. You can’t toss around the word ‘sparkly’ with just any old sperm term.

  17. Silver James says:

    Holly, I’ll try to educate you without squicking everyone. Wolves, as in the furry kind that don’t turn into men, have knots at the base of their wolf wangs. When they do it with a female wolf, the knot slips inside her after the male ejaculates and the couple is “tied” until the swelling in the knot goes down. I suspect that’s what the reference is to. Now, cats, are are totally different critter—at least big cats. Male lions have spiney protrusions on their mane-ly wangs that stick in the female lion afterwards and they’re hooked together until he goes to sleep. Yeah, I know. Typical male.

    Do NOT ask how I know these things. I just do. And no, I have never used tying with my werewolves because just…no.

  18. Ova says:

    Reading this thread reminded me of how much I loved Joan Vinge’s Cat novels. They’re not the HABO book (no sparkle splooge) but they feature a half-alien feline hero who has some mind-trippy sexual experiences. And also thanks to this thread, I now know what knotting is. The more you know.

  19. Mara says:

    I’m new to the genre and just reading this thread makes me even more excited to further explore Romancelandia… I love that apparently this was a trope in the 90s. Which begs the question- where has all the glittery jizz gone?

  20. Tam B. says:

    I have no idea what this book is but can we please find it and then beg / bribe Elyse to review it????  I’ll happily put Tim Tams in the post if it will help. 🙂

  21. This raises the “Who sleeps on the wet spot?” issue to a whole new level.

  22. DonnaMarie says:

    @Darlene, I had the same thought about “pearl necklaces”.

    Gah, I can’t believe I said that! Never go on this site before coffee.

  23. Erin Burns says:

    In to find what the heck this book is.

  24. cleo says:

    How did I not read these alien cat books in the 90s? In the 90s, I read UF, I read SF/F, I read romance, I read erotica, but somehow I did not read space alien cat shifter romances, with or without sparkles.

    And Cate, I’m not shocked or surprised that you only remembered the sparkly spunk – who would forget that? I’m grateful, really, because this thread is so much fun.

  25. LauraL says:

    I dug out and checked my copy of Rejar by Dara Joy, which is set in 1811 London, so the time period is probably not right. Did a quick glance while on a boring conference call but no mention of sparkling ejaculations. However, the alien catman is fascinated by the heroine’s beautiful pearlescent breasts.

  26. It’s enormous that you are getting ideas from this post as well
    as from our argument made here.

  27. marjorie says:

    Mallory Rush’s daughter is my hairstylist! Whether or not Mallory is the author of this particular sparkly jizzfest, I am SO tracking down Kiss of the Beast. Do knot doubt it. (Rimshot.)

  28. Holly Bush says:

    Silver James – Thank you for the info about knots and spiney wangs. I had no, absolutely no, idea about the knots and such on the real animal and confess that I’ve never read a romance with a hero or heroine that is not of the human species. It just does not work for me on all kinds of levels but, hey, what ever sparkles up your you know what is OK.

  29. Cate M. says:

    @Heather: OMG, it is. It’s Kiss of the Beast. THANK YOU. You have no idea how much of a relief it is to know I wasn’t hallucinating the whole thing.

    I am sort of afraid to buy a copy, and yet…I HAVE TO. For, uh, science.

  30. Yesss, I knew my random knowledge of crazy romances would come in handy someday! You’ll be happy to know there’s a relatively cheap ebook version available on Amazon.

  31. Karen H near Tampa says:

    Just to add to the general knowledge base, last weekend my partner was channel surfing (as he is wont to do) and landed on a show about the reproductive habits of marsupials.  If you think knots and spines are odd, what about 4 (I kid you not) heads!  Only two of them get erect but the female’s vagina literally has a fork and thus both sides are attended to.  It wasn’t the kangaroo although the female kangaroo has two birthing canals and keeps a fertilized egg in reserve in one in case something happens to the first one.  I wish I could remember the type of marsupial with the four heads but it escapes me.  One of the funniest things was the male researcher fondling the male in order to expose the four heads so that the camera could film it.  Ah, the wonders of nature TV!

  32. Mag says:

    Ova, I loved Joan Vinge’s book Catspaw and also Psion.  The main character, Cat, was an alien and a Psion, but not as I remember, a cat man. Catspaw refers to a person used as a dupe,which is what happened to Cat.  This book is great!  I loved it.

  33. You haven’t plumbed the depths of weird reproductive apparatus until you’ve googled… DUCK DONGS.

  34. Rowan says:

    A few years ago there was a six part series on Discovery called Wild Sex which covered the bizarre and and weird world of animal sex.  I mostly remember the male polar bear staggering away afterwards because was was…ahem…broken.

  35. Jazzlet says:

    Rhinoceros, six foot long, goes in partially erect the first three feet in take a 90 degree turn, then a cauliflower like thing is engorged to lock the lot in place. Rhinoceroses (sp) can’t exactly grip their partners.

  36. Rowan says:

    And whales have prehensile members.  Now that’s an image that’s burned into my mind forever.

  37. PamG says:

    So that’s what happened to Crawford at the dog park.  Another knotty problem solved…

  38. Claire C says:

    @Karen H It’s the echidna!!

    More fun facts: baby echidnas are called puggles and feed from milk patches inside the mom’s pouch, since female echidnas don’t have nipples.

  39. Jae Lee says:

    I’m glad someone figured this one out. I went to add it to my GR shelves and was very amused to see the new activity on the title too. Has anyone suggested doing a HABO book club? That would be le awesome.

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