Book Review

Decadent by Shayla Black

D-

Title: Decadent
Author: Shayla Black
Publication Info: Berkley 2007
ISBN: 9780425217214
Genre: Erotica/Erotic Romance, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy

(Warning: Massive spoilers for this book lie under the fold, as well as a link to a LOLPORN photo. Read on at your own peril.)


Reading Decadent deafened me.

Have you ever had that experience before? You finish reading a book and you feel just a bit numb. Your brain is ringing the way your ears do when leaving a venue with a terrible sound system, after watching a band that’s far too fond of playing very loudly and not nearly fond enough of playing with skill. I haven’t read too many novels that do that to me, so I attempted to analyze why Decadent inspired that reaction, and what I finally figured out was this:

The book was written in such a way that its ideal narrator was the Summer Blockbuster Guy.

“This summer… An innocent beauty learns the price of earning the love she thinks she wants… is finding love in a place she never expected.”

“This summer… A hardened soldier of fortune discovers that gaining the girl of his dreams… means letting go of the girl in his past.”

“This summer… A girl becomes a woman… and learns she can preserve her virginity… by having anal sex with two men.”

“HANG ON,” I can almost hear you saying. “You’re just making shit up, now. Candy, your slice-n-dice reviews have gone too far.”

Psh. You think I’d kid about something that important? You think I would make a crass joke about teh buttsecks to illustrate how incredibly silly this book is? Trust me. I’m not even remotely kidding about that last bit. In fact, there’s no way I can convey how silly this book is. It is so silly that I expected Graham Chapman to appear in Colonel regalia, declaring that this book was too silly to continue.

Alas, the latter would indicate that this book was funny. And it’s not. I initially read this book as a bit of high camp and was able to maintain this mindset (and therefore enjoy it to some degree) for about one third of the way, because the plot was too deliciously cock-eyed for me to take seriously: Kimber Edgington, the heroine, is in love with Jesse McCall, her childhood sweetheart (whom she hasn’t seen in almost a decade—whom she knew only for a summer when she was a kid, really). Jesse happens to be an international rock star with a taste for threesomes. Not the usual boy-girl-girl threesomes that are the stuff of fantasy for millions of males, of course. This dude’s into two guys and a girl. (Structuring this story any other way would’ve involved TEH GAY for the heroine.) So Kimber, in her quest to prove her everlasting love and commitment, decides she needs tutoring in the Ways of the Double Penetration, and seeks out Deke Trenton, a mercenary who used to work for her father and who apparently has a thing for threesomes.

(How does she know this? One of the more hilarious aspects of Deke’s fetish for this bit of vanilla kink is how everybody seems to know about it, from sheltered girls in their twenties to random people in bars to the Kimber’s brothers to Kimber’s dad. Seriously: every time somebody finds out that Kimber is having a relationship with Deke Trenton, there’s usually some sort of horrified gasp (or inarticulate rage on the part of the brothers), followed by “Do you know what he’s into?” It makes me wonder how in the hell they’d find out something like that. Does the dude have a Wikipedia page? If he did, I’d love to see his history/discussion pages.)

And when I say “he has a fetish for threesomes,” I mean it in the clinical sense. (The pedants in the audience will note that the fetish isn’t, strictly speaking, a fetish, because it refers to a sex act instead of an object or a body part. Look, just go along with me, all right? Pretend I said “paraphilia” and call it a day.) Seriously, Deke can’t work his dirk of manly passion unless he has additional male company. No, I’m serious. This dude hath not a workable stiffy unless another dude is there. Specifically, his cousin, celebrity chef Luc Traverson. This initially perked my interest—was Luc the Piers Gaveston to Deke’s Edward II, except kind of incestuous, which would make it somewhat more kinky? Alas, no. The true reasons why these two paragons of masculinity engage almost exclusively in threesomes are both much more hilarious and much more repulsive than using a woman as a conduit to express homosexual urges. But more on that later.

So I trucked along for a while, wallowing cheerfully in the terrible plot, but after a while, the sheer weight of the terrible prose crushed my sense of humor. The only comfort left to me was reading the more ludicrous parts out loud to friends.

The part that broke me? The part that made me throw my hands up and say “I give up”? Was when Kimber decides that her virginity is so special, she needs to save it for Jesse. And by “save her virginity,” I totally mean “have copious amounts of loud, sweaty, multi-orgasmic anal sex with two men she’s known less than a week.”

If this had been written with any sort of tongue in cheek tone, or with any sort of nod or wink to the sorts of people for whom anal sex is somehow a culturally acceptable way of preserving a façade of sexual purity (read: stupid, horny teenagers for whom obeying the letter of the law is much more important than adhering to the spirit), I would’ve cheered it for the bit of high camp it was. Unfortunately, the story tried to sell the heroine as being a smart, spirited young woman a little too hard while showing just the opposite in every turn.

Come on, now. Preserving your virginity with buttsecks. Look, I’m all for people enjoying the hell out of anal sex, and I’m all for people having it with as many partners as they can stand at one time. Just don’t pretend that you’re somehow protecting your sexual purity by having it—whatever sort of definition of “sex” you may subscribe to, I’m pretty goddamn sure just about everyone would agree that that having a man stick his cock up your ass qualifies as “having sex” with him.

But wait, there’s more! Deke, besides being incapable of fucking a woman unless Luc is there (NOT GAY NO NOT AT ALL), has a really, really strange complex about virgins. Namely, he’s convinced that fucking a virgin in the va-jay-jay means she’ll die. This is made into a Really Big Deal, and is also part and parcel of his sexual dysfunction in general and with Kimber in particular (NO REALLY NOT AT ALL GAY). This results in the best conversational exchange in any erotic romance novel, ever, when Kimber finally offers to allow Deke entrance into her cinnabar cavern of feminine wonder (because what she feels for Deke is even more speshul than what she feels for Jesse), and Deke, after pondering and sweating and struggling over this decision heroically, takes decisive action:

“Fuck!” he snarled.

He tilted her up again, her legs now resting on his shoulders, and positioned himself and began to push.

Into her back entrance.

Kimber drew in a great, shocked gasp, her hazel eyes wide. “Deke?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Luc barked.

Tensing a little more with every inch he pushed inside Kimber’s tight passage, the tendons on his neck standing out, the muscles in his arms shaking, assailed by the amazing sensations of being slowly enveloped by her tight, ready flesh, Deke could barely form a word. “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

 

Wow. Talk about a lifesaving procedure you’ll never see on-camera on, say, Grey’s Anatomy.

But wait, there’s more! When I read this part aloud to my friend Ben (who was the first victim of many), his immediate response, after he’d picked himself up from the floor, was “I’m in ur ass, saving ur life.”

And being the enterprising nerd that he is, he actually hunted down a picture and captioned it, LOLCat-style.
(Warning: the picture is pornographic. It seriously is. Don’t click on it, for the love of God, if you’re anywhere in the office, or if there are little kids or animals or sweet, sheltered little old grandparents within a direct line of sight of your monitor.)

So behold! The first instance of LOLPorn found on Smart Bitches.

Recovered from that yet?

No?

Too bad.

After that marvellous bit of characterization, the story chugs along completely predictable lines: Kimber is dumped brutally by Deke (who’s utterly freaked out at how attached he has become), after which she promptly reunites with Jesse, finds him to be not at all what her memories have made him to be, and is repulsed by Jesse’s regular threesome partner, a pretty boy with tattoos who drinks before lunch—evidence of moral turpitude if we’ve ever seen it.

And then a wacky suspense plot springs up out of nowhere and ambushes the rest of the storyline, putting Kimber in danger (remember, kids: it’s never acceptable to have the heroine save the hero’s ass, because that might mean he’s a pansy who can’t get it up unless another man’s also…oh, wait). All of this is a convenient way of getting Deke back together with Kimber so he can open up about his Deep, Dark, Loathsome, Virgin-Killing past—the explanation for why he never fucks virgins, and why he always has to have a wingman in bed. Are you ready for the secret?

Back when Deke was a teenager, he de-virginized his beautiful but highly unstable girlfriend, who became pregnant, got crazy, and killed herself.

That’s it. That’s the big, dark, tormented secret of Deke’s past. Which is actually a pretty good tormented secret, except that his reactions are both nonsensical and morally repulsive. When you attempt to unpack the implications, you come up with the following:

1. His avoidance of sleeping with virgins only makes sense if you accept that virgins are much more likely to become pregnant than other women. Because it’s not as if there’s such a thing as fertile non-virgins, or, you know, BIRTH CONTROL THAT WORKS RELIABLY.

2. Deke needs another man in bed so that if the woman becomes pregnant, he’d have another man to blame. Because in Deke’s universe, paternity tests, like birth control, do not exist.

In case you’re thinking that I’m inferring point number 2, let me assure you that I’m not. I am, in fact, quoting “another man to blame” verbatim from the book.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: this book is a trainwreck of unintentional hilarity. If ever there was a book ripe for MST3K treatment or a drinking game (take a shot every time a character starts a musing with “Damn”), this would be it. The sex scenes are pretty hot, I’ll give it that, but even those are subject to gems like “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

If you’re really into copious quantities of sweaty, distressingly hetero buttsex and a menage that wimps out in the end, you might enjoy this book. Me? I’m still recovering from the LOLPorn.

And really, if I had to summarize the book, I think the look on the porn actress’s face in the LOLPorn photo says it all.

Comments are Closed

  1. SonomaLass says:

    This is the most entertainment I’ve had in days! (Candy’s review, Ben’s LOLpron and these comments, and even the excerpts themselves—but I don’t think I could handle actually reading the book.)  I was holding it together until Elton John, then I lost it completely.  So completely that Nora’s “Carry on” had me right back on the floor, rolling.

    I love me some Smart Bitches!

  2. Bordeaux says:

    First post.  You’ve all had me in stitches all evening!  I’m actually posting simply to share my spam word with you:
    life69. heh.

  3. Aemelia says:

    OMG…my body hurts from laughing so hard today…

  4. USWriter says:

    OMFG!  Don’t you people realize I had to GO TO WORK with ‘moral turpitude’ and ‘fucking her ass, saving her life’ rolling around my head, trying not to laugh my own ass off while giving great office? 
    Please keep it up (heh); it’s a deadly dull job.
    U.S. Writer

  5. sandyLou says:

    I am so, so happy this site exists. I haven’t laughed so hard in years. I can barely breathe!
    I’m pretty sure this could be an episode of Grey’s Anatomy-

  6. sandra says:

    LOLporn woman?  I thought that was a guy!  Spamword is image63.  I guess she’s got a very manly image.

  7. OK, you all are ruining my work today.  I had myself pulled together, but then Ben’s haiku and Nora’s “carry on” sent me right back over the edge.

    Spam word: food46 – Fine, as long as it’s not 46 LifeSavers

  8. Elizabeth says:

    Dammit, I work at an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, I can’t click the link.

    I can’t.

    Oh god I can’t do it.

    I really really want to, though.

  9. Wry Hag says:

    Jesse, international rock star.
    Deke, mercenary.
    Luc, celebrity chef.

    [LOOOOONG pause before continuing with book.]

    A “back entrance” that’s a “tight passage”?  Well, okay, finally something I can relate to.  So I read on.  (I despise our backdoor and hallway. Two people, or one person and a dog, can barely squeeze between its walls. The tendons in my neck and the muscles in my arms stand out just trying to get my damned coat on or off.)

    But—OOPS—stalled again.  Saving a woman’s life by fucking her in the ass?  Pshaw.  It’s a medical fact that some hymens do indeed extend into females’ rectums, which are, in said females, connected to their uteri and their secret suicide buttons.

    Finally, out of respect for scientific accuracy, I must stop reading.  Although, to the author’s credit, it is possible for the men in a two-man threesome to blame each other for the woman’s pregnancy.  Why?  Because certain men can sweat sperm, and the unique physiological mechanism that allows for this makes DNA testing impossible. 

    (That picture, by the way, was just roadkill groaty.  Think I’m gonna go get that sex-change operation now.)

    GREAT REVIEW, CANDY!

  10. Candy says:

    Wry Hag: that last bit of your comment about sweating sperm had me going “Oh my God, that’s hilarious and fucked up and she’s TOTALLY kidding…I think?” Good job.

  11. Susan/DC says:

    So if Kimber (rhymes with limber) does get pregnant and kill herself—after all, according to Deke’s line of thought, isn’t that the reaction of most women to news they’re going to have a baby—would she then qualify for a Darwin award?  Or would she have to get pregnant and kill Deke too?

    Okay, my spam blocker is truth39, which I take to mean that I trust the SB to tell me the truth about books like this.

  12. Tina says:

    I was chuckling but pretty much keeping it together until:

    All I can hear right now is elton John singing “Someone saved my life tonight”. Do you think this is what he meant?

    That made me ROLL!

    (Good thing I wasn’t at work when I read that one.  On the other hand, the net nanny at work has decided that the comments section is porn.  Not the site—the comments.  And no, this wasn’t the comment section that set it off, believe it or not.)

    friends31—a few too many to invite to the menage, obviously.

  13. Another Damn Sarah says:

    I didn’t cover Luc’s incredibly retarded conflict and reasons for having threesomes in my review, because holy jebus it’s retarded, but here it is: he’s sterile, and he’s hoping that Deke’s super-sperm will impregnate a woman and he can have a happy threesome family 4-evah.

    Well, that’s actually kind of Arthurian.

    If you read Marion Zimmer Bradley, that is.  I don’t think it’s in Arthur, Morte d’.

  14. Madeleine says:

    Oh my god. Candy, I like LifeSavers. And now I can never eat them again. 🙁

  15. Lorelie says:

    Oh sweet baby jesus, I don’t know where to begin with the laughter and the comments and the lolporn.  I’m supposed to be fixing my friend’s research paper!

  16. Aimee says:

    now that i think about it, and sadly it’s taken up the better part of my day, wouldn’t this plot synopses go really well with the Sims Doin’ It Threeway Style cover from the snark post the other day?  The Polyamourous Princess.

    I mean, the Jesus figure totally looks like he could be a French chef, and the blond dude is totally Special Forces of the Ass (save the woman, save the world).  He’s wearing the right skivvies for it.

  17. Aimee says:

    now that i think about it, and sadly it’s taken up the better part of my day, wouldn’t this plot synopses go really well with the Sims Doin’ It Threeway Style cover from the snark post the other day?  The Polyamourous Princess i think it was.

    i mean, the Jesus figure totally looks like he could be a French chef, and the blond dude is totally Special Forces of the Ass (saving the world one ass fucking at a time).  he’s wearing the right skivvies for it

  18. Thorn says:

    Ow, my poor brain! Ow, my girly bits! Ow, my… you get the idea.

    You have broken me.

  19. Anj says:

    I have to say, the phrase “Special Forces of the Ass” just made my night.
    wow. hilarious.

    Also, this book is hilarious. I spent all afternoon waiting to come home so I could click the LOLporn link.

    Save a woman. Fuck an ass…

  20. Wirdald says:

    Y’all have corrupted me. I just googled “LOLporn” and, amazingly enough, someone else was there before you (and the innuendo continues).

    Also, what is “aroused gravel” and where do I get some? Is it better than the regular gravel I have in my driveway? It sure sounds better.

  21. Denni says:

    I’d read recommendations for this book and it has a good Amazon rating…so I read it.

    If you can get past the BS noted by Candy, you get the CS (chicken*@!).

    Spoiler Alert**********
    This book admits to being menage and is marketed as menage.  About half way, readers watch Kimber becoming disallusioned with the Rockstar.  As a reader, I’m trying to overlook the ditz factor, and Ms. Black has the manage working.  She’s liking Deke, and I’m liking Luc. Then, whamo.  Out of the blue, Kimber gets cold feet in the next to last chapter.  Somebody gets abruptly tossed out of the mange, and the book ends with a traditional white picket fence, twosome, HEA…ack!

    Never again Ms. Black.

    I’ll view the LOLporn after kids are asleep.

  22. willaful says:

    This book must take place in the same Romancelandia Alternate Universe as Harlequin Presents. Paternity tests don’t exist there, either.

  23. Brandi says:

    My husband made some of the most interesting facial expressions reading the excerpts from this book.

    As for headsploderation potential, I highly, highly recommend reading this in the company of sympathetic company. For variety, use Disney Movie Guy voice, Romantic Comedy guy voice, or Art House Tragedy guy voice just to mix things up.

    Here’s a handy-dandy reminder of what some of those guys sound like.

  24. Myriantha Fatalis says:

    I’d love to set Deke up with that chick from the movie Liquid Sky.  “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.” versus “I kill with my cunt!”?  A match made in … well, somewhere anyway.

    As for the voiceovers, I’m imagining the Movie Phone guy:  “Hello!  And welcome to ménage, kitten!”

  25. Candy says:

    As for the voiceovers, I’m imagining the Movie Phone guy:  “Hello!  And welcome to ménage, kitten!”

    Holy cow. This is amazing and brilliant.

    Reading the book in the Krusty the Klown voice (both the jocular and regular varieties) would yield awesome results, too.

  26. Eirin says:

    I broke down.

    I just bought it.

    Shit!

    Nothing can save me now…oh, wait…

  27. OMG – all of you are killing me!!!  The review and the comments and the LOLPorn!!

    I’ll never hear Elton John or the Movie Phone guy the same way again!

    Spam word: together47—47 times? Years? Partners?

  28. Ishie says:

    The “How to Save a Life” background music comment was the one that got me grabbing my side with teh pain.

    Though I was going with the Scrubs, not Grey’s version, which means that episode’s never gonna make me cry again because I’ll be too busy picturing red lifesavers.  Thanks Smart Bitches!

  29. Oh god – now I have to know. In the HEA, is Deke cured by her magic hooha? How does he manage to function without his wingman? (Is Luc bitter by his ousting?) Or does “Kitten” remain a “virgin” forever, having her life saved over and over again?

  30. Another Damn Sarah says:

    Maybe they just have Luc on speaker phone.  There and yet not there.

  31. Sandra D says:

    All the references to Elton John songs has “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” running through my head now.

  32. MamaNice says:

    Candy,
    when you quoted directly from the book for us…“she heard a rip and a tear” – I thought it was the sound of her rectum, no really – I’m not joking – I had to re-read twice to be sure it said “condom.”

    I still can’t get over the LOLporn – the chick is clearly trying to give him a visual aid of which hole he’s supposed to be using. Maybe that’s why she appears so perturbed…,“it’s right there – how could you miss it?”

  33. snarkhunter says:

    MamaNice, you’re not the only one who thought that. I was more than a bit horrified.

    I’ve tried to come up with an adequate comment for this for two days, and I got nothin’.

    Except that I think I’ll stick with fanfiction for all my menage-reading needs.

  34. Erin says:

    Candy,
    when you quoted directly from the book for us…“she heard a rip and a tear” – I thought it was the sound of her rectum, no really – I’m not joking – I had to re-read twice to be sure it said “condom.”

    I thought exactly the same thing.

    And isn’t “a rip and a tear” redundant? Unless you’re Rip Torn, I suppose.

  35. Angelina says:

    Every time I read that “Welcome to menage” I see Axel Rose screaming: “You know where you are, you in the menage baby, you gonna die”

    Rebyj: I spit my morning tea on the “Circle of Life”. Crap, I think I ruined my desktop calander.

  36. Anj says:

    Okay, I thought we had topped out until I heard Axel Rose singing “Welcome to Menage”… and then I googled the lyrics because I couldn’t remember them all. And I got this (it’s practically perfect):
    “Welcome to Menage
    We got fun ‘n’ games
    We got everything you want
    Honey we know the names
    We are the people that can find
    Whatever you may need
    If you got the money honey
    We got your disease

    In the jungle
    Welcome to the jungle
    Watch it bring you to your shun n,n,n,n,,n,n,,n,n,n,,n,n,,n knees, knees
    I wanna watch you bleed”

  37. I just forwarded this to my boyfriend as the perfect representation of a Smart Bitch review, and why I love y’all sooooo damn much!!!!!!

    Plus, we were talking about LOLpr0n a couple days ago and this is quite appropriate.

  38. Uh uh says:

    This stuff gets published when I can’t even find an agent?
    Life is Cruel.

    Amen to that.

    And if she was an AV, Candy would you be willing to describe, briefly, the de-virgin(n)ing scene?  Was it painless and orgasmic?  Was there discussion about how the AV should be taken?

    Do you know what AV also stands for? In the ranching world it stands for artificial vagina.
    Bwhahahahahahahahahaha

    caused something to break inside just now.  Laughing discretely while hemorrhaging inside isn’t as easy as it sounds.

    As for the voiceovers, I’m imagining the Movie Phone guy:  “Hello!  And welcome to ménage, kitten!”

    How I love you guys. Seriously. This is the best laugh I’ve had since I watched Death at a Funeral.

  39. LadyRhian says:

    Also, what is “aroused gravel” and where do I get some? Is it better than the regular gravel I have in my driveway? It sure sounds better.

    My guess is it would be like regular gravel, only harder. Maybe bigger, too.

    Y’know, even though I like the idea of a Japanese Menage (2 Men, 1 Woman)… I call it a “Woman Sandwich”. (I’m not sure why it’s called a Japanese… a sex book I used to have called it that), the quotes from the book, make me squicked rather than turned on. So I’ll be giving this one a pass.

  40. Eirin says:

    My guess is it would be like regular gravel, only harder. Maybe bigger, too.

    You know, I’d been wondering about that one too.

    …make me squicked rather than turned on.

    All part of the fun. I have a shelf-ful of

    really bad novels

    prime crack. When my copy arrives (and after I’ve printed out and taped in the LOLPorn pic), I fully expect it to stand erect among even those hefty tomes.
    I consider it a legacy to the posterior.

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