Sometimes, reading a book makes you rage and scream. Other times, it is so bafflingly offensive and odd that you keep reading just to make sure you aren’t drawing the wrong conclusion.
This is one of those times. This book rant comes from Cate Marsden, and y’all really need to read this.
Okay, I will straight up admit that I bought Beyond Desire for the cover.
LOOK at that cover.
She’s in a turquoise stripper Genie outfit giving a lapdance to a tanned shirtless dude.
I needed to know where that was going.
Victorian England? Was not where I thought that was going. Go back and look at that cover again, seriously.
So the story starts with hero, Ryder Culhane, having flashbacks to his Oirish childhood of poverty and abuse. In the present day he has a mysterious “knowing” which allows him to make a living assisting archeologists, because that is a viable career option if you are a psychic Irishman in a romance novel of this kind.
I have to pause to warn you that archeology is presented in this book as part treasure hunt and part Noble Mission to Defeat Evil Cults. I tried sharing bits with people I know who have done actual degrees and fieldwork, and I think at least one of them is still in tears. So there’s that.
Our heroine, Alexandra deLisle, is having trouble with her younger sister, Allegra. Allegra sleepwalks at night, tearing their deceased archeologist father’s study apart in search of a set of stone bracelets that he brought home from the plains of Allekah. Sir Arthur Hadenham, the head of the British Imperial Museum, wants to buy the bracelets, even though when their father was alive Sir Arthur thought they were fake. Allegra, who stomps around pouting and accusing Alexandra of being her jailer, wants to sell them.
Allegra is misinformed about prison, because actual jailers do not let you sneak off all the time to hang out with the sinister next-door neighbour. There’s a bit of a Creepy Race Thing going on with the neighbour, because he’s from the vague-middle-east and is 1) the villain and 2) obsessed with the heroine/her sister’s white asses. I mean that literally, but we’ll get to that part later. For now you just need to know that Alexandra is suspicious of him, but for some reason is powerless to stop Allegra from seeing him even though there was a creepy incident back when Allegra was fourteen and he was taking semi-nude photos of her.
The neighbour, Dzmura, throws the creepiest dinner party ever for Allegra, Alexandra, and Culhane. There’s a lot of blather about good and evil, and how a religion could be based on worshipping evil rather than good, and he leers at Allegra. He’s a treasure hunter/archeologist too, and Culhane has worked for him.
That night Alexandra wakes up to find Allegra has vanished. Culhane, who crashed at Dzmura’s place, wakes up to find him gone as well. So Culhane decides to go after him, only Alexandra makes him take her along too by refusing to give him the bracelets, which he needs for reasons. Reasons that never made sense to me first or last, I’ll admit. They aren’t real artifacts, they’re fake ones Alexandra’s father made up, which eventually lead to the Evil Cult’s Lair. I don’t know.
So since the bracelets are vitally important to his quest to save her sister’s life, Alexandra refuses to give them to him unless he takes her along to the middle east. He agrees, but only on the condition that she becomes his odalisque. I had to Google that. It’s a female slave or concubine. She’s agreeing to be his sex slave, you guys.
If you’re keeping track, so far the Bad Guy has enslaved one sister and the Good Guy has enslaved the other one. The Bad Guy has been grooming the younger sister for sex, and the Good Guy coerces the older sister for sex. The Bad Guy kills people in an effort to prevent the Good Guy from tracking him down and killing him and everyone in his household.
So what exactly, you might wonder, determines which one IS the Bad Guy?
The book provides an easy answer: The Bad Guy likes anal sex.
No, really.
I’ve seen this before in Old School romances, and it’s never made a whole lot of sense as a shorthand for “this guy is evil,” but it’s taken to glorious new heights (depths?) in this one because he has an Anal Harem.
Let me repeat that: he has an entire harem of women (and at least one manservant) who are there specifically for anal sex.
There’s a whole lot of homophobia embedded there, and the heroine dwells a lot on her sister’s boyish figure, and later tries to throttle some other woman in the harem while insulting her boyish figure. Plus, you know, there’s an actual scene where Dzmura is shown lying next to a guy looking all post-coital. It made me grind my teeth a little. But it was also pretty damned funny.
Also, I spent two whole days thinking “anal harem” was a 60s band before working out that 1) that was actually Procol Harum and 2) Hey, this book should have been called A Whiter Shade of Tail.
Because it is also one of those books where the Bad Guy is, as I’ve said, middle eastern and cannot get enough of the heroine’s tail — or actually her sister’s, but he wants the heroine’s too. Badly enough that he kidnaps her, and installs her in the Anal Harem.
Then when he can’t rape her (because she laughs at his strap-on, causing his actual Spear of Love to wilt) he makes her yell and moan and whatever while he has sex with someone else. This happens at least twice, and once the other woman is her sister, which should have been awful but was just hilarious and stupid because WHO DOES THAT? Who gets a woman to fake sex noises so people outside the room will believe he’s had her?
I feel like I should spend more time on Culhane and Alexandra, since they are the hero and heroine, but mostly all they do is travel across the middle east having confusing sex. I’m not kidding. This book falls smack in the middle between “don’t describe sex” and “describe sex accurately,” so it’s all purple prose and vague explosions. I pity anyone who tried to learn about sex from this book.
“A stream of molten silver slid down her veins to her ripe velvet core, and she levered upwards to meet it.” (p. 146)
Okay then. I can’t even tell for sure whether that’s a sex scene or she’s shooting heroin.
I’m trying to keep this simple, but I can’t express the sheer confusing craziness without mentioning that there are THREE sets of super secret ancient stone bracelets: the ones Allegra wanted to sell; a second more-or-less identical set which Culhane finds in a secret wall safe in their house on the night Allegra runs away with Dzmura; and a third set they find at the British Legation House in whatever country Allekah is supposed to be in.
At one point there’s a stunning revelation that they aren’t bracelets at all, but parts of a set of candlesticks. I had to put the book down and laugh hysterically for a while. Then all three sets turn out to be fakes made by Alexandra’s father to lead them to the headquarters of the leader of the evil cult.
Couldn’t he just stick up a wall map with “evil cult is here” on it? Waiting for someone with a broken set of Ikea candlesticks to eventually go to the last place you were archeology-ing at is not an efficient means of communication.
Then Alexandra gets kidnapped for the Anal Harem, and Culhane uses the bracelets to decode (?) a message left by her father, revealing the location of the Anal Harem. Because Dzmura is the evil cult leader, you see. Culhane burns the place down, killing who knows how many people, and rescues Alexandra and (temporarily) Allegra. Allegra is really, really angry at being rescued from her life of anal sex. And I mean: they just tracked down her lover and killed him. I would be fully on her side, except the fact that he’s been grooming her for years is horrible.
Culhane is also angry, because — wait for it — he thinks Alexandra might have had sex while she was kidnapped and held against her will in a harem. And this is INFURIATING, not just for all the things obviously wrong with that, but because all through this damned book he’s been psychic. Sometimes he reads her mind; sometimes he reads Dzmura’s mind, or the minds of Dzmura’s henchmen. But now, just so that can have this stupid argument and sulk and she can return to England without him, he can’t tell what happened.
Then everything happens all at once: Sir Arthur Hadenham is at Dzmura’s house, because he is the new head of the evil cult. Culhane is there, and Allegra is going to shoot him and Alexandra, but instead Allegra gets shot by Culhane’s manservant, who then ALSO turns out to evil, so Alexandra shoots him, and then the house burns down.
Yes, poor Allegra dies. It’s actually fairly awful. I mean, she’s written to be whiney and a bit delusional, so I couldn’t actually LIKE her, but then she gets killed for being the servant/brainwashed victim/whatever of New Evil Cult Leader, and I was all “…oh my God.”
It also makes the whole impetus of the “plot” (“Sure, I’ll be your sex slave as long as I can help RESCUE MY SISTER”) suddenly just disappear:
“She is with him now,” Alexandra whispered. “They shared the same fate.” (p.440)
Which is pretty horrible given it starts off as an adventure story with the goal of saving her sister.
Alexandra agrees to be Culhane’s odalisque again, and he’s okay with her now even though they haven’t sorted out any of the issues like, oh, him blaming her for being raped even though she was never in fact raped. It’s a happy ending, because coercive sex is fine when the hero does it, as long as it’s not anal I guess. The end.
It’s an absolute trainwreck, but it was hugely entertaining. The Anal Harem and Dzmura’s huge rubber strap-on are unforgettable. Like, “I will need therapy to get over this” levels of unforgettable.
Also in its favour: Alexandra really, truly, enthusiastically likes sex (once Culhane has coerced her into it. Ugh), at one point fantasizing about having her own harem of ten men.
Plus the confusing sex scenes were hot, at least insofar as I could understand what was happening.
Aside from the Anal Harem, what stays with me from this book is a faint sense that I’ve been reading something in code. The text is littered with tropes that feel like a kind of shorthand: a preference for anal sex means he’s evil; a foreign setting means sex outside marriage is okay; enjoying (vaginal) sex with the hero proves he actually is the hero. The tropes aren’t just tropes, they’re also metaphors, and unfortunately I think you had to have read this in the time it was written to fully understand them.
But that Anal Harem? Yeah, that’s the kind of timeless total insanity that’ll live on forever.
This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Your Local Library (US).
I laughed aloud at
I think this book would make me want to hurt people though.
lolol
It’s four in the morning, I just got off the phone with the daughter on the other coast, and this review still made me laugh. A lot. Thanks! Though there are some parts that may be stuck in my mind forever. Anal harem, for instance. Um, yeah.
*standing ovation* That is a truly epic review. Thank you
Of laughter or despair?
Though, in the book’s defense, early archeology did have quite a bit of treasure hunting and bad fieldwork.
‘Who gets a woman to fake sex noises so people outside the room will believe he’s had her?’
That’s a scene in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion! (It’s only slightly less ridiculous than this scene and involves the statement ‘I am America and you are Columbus! Discover me!’) But… giant rubber strap-on? (Like, as an additional appendage?) How… actually I don’t really want to know how.
That one sentence made this my new favourite review of all time.
I’m pretty sure I read this book. All I remember is the sisters’ situation … the rest … maybe I developed some traumatic amnesia over it.
And did you know? some people confuse “odalisque” with “obelisk”
Have you not seen the movie Easy A starring Emma Stone? Because you should. Her friend is being tormented, so she agrees to have fake sex at a party so people will leave him alone. She then finds there are quite a few guys willing to have fake sex in order to “up” there appeal.
Of course the sister had to die. She enjoyed anal sex.
At least Allegra doesn’t have to worry about allergies.
And when it comes to faking sex noises, there’s the scene in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL where exes Peter and Sarah are in adjoining hotel rooms and when Sarah hears Peter and Rachel gettin’ it on, Sarah jumps her new man Aldous and ups the volume on their sex. (I love Aldous’ post-sex comment: “I mean, I’ve heard that women do fake orgasms, but I’ve never seen it… It really, deeply upset me.”)
This also reminds me of this exchange from the British comedy COUPLING:
Sally: I hate having sex at home. I’ve got a listening flatmate.
Jane: Oh no, I hate those. Do you have to be really quiet for her?
Sally: No, I have to be really loud. We’re very competitive.
Okay, seriously, just based on the cover and description, I thought this thing was written in the 70s, or 80s, not even the 90s. But 2003? Seriously?
*head desks*
I laughed out loud at “I can’t even tell for sure whether that’s a sex scene or she’s shooting heroin.”
Thank you for turning my despair into the joyous realization that your review itself proves that all is not lost…yet.
I have to say that writers like Thea Devine were made for Kindle reading. These are the deeply guilty pleasure books that you really,really really don’t want anyone to know that you’re reading. WTFery & Thea Devine skip merrily hand in hand,making for a match made in Old Skool romance land.
Thank you. Loved the review.
What’s up with the strap-on? I mean, if his actual Spear of Love is functional (until she laughs at the strap-on), why is the strap-on even there?
Not curious enough to actually read the book to find out.
Cate’s right: the phrase ‘WTF’ was made for Thea Devine. Some of her short stories are (more) coherent, but her full length novels are just…IDEK, man. Sarah, if you ever get over this, I kind of need you to review ‘The Forever Kiss’, because the bizarre, it is so strong with that one.
I think the strap-on was so he could fill both orifices at once … all by his lonesome.
This rant is from Cate Marsden, but you’re all tempting me with equal-strength WTFery and my will is … weak.
I almost choked on my lunch while reading this. I can’t even imagine putting myself through reading this book and based on the cover I wouldn’t have even touched it because it looks Old-skool.
I do know that anal harem will be stuck in my head all day and I’ll probably slip up in my meeting and say it. I hope not. I doubt my boss will find that helpful in selling software.
@Donna June, actually 2003 was a reprint; apparently the original publication was 1993, which still seems late, but Thea Divine
Sorry, Devine (the last comment sent itself). In checking the date I noticed that this book seems to be the only one of her’s on Amazon, but there are lots of them in UBSs. (I made the mistake of reading (part of) one once, and while I’ve suppressed the details, it wasn’t this one.)
She’s not in Wikipedia. Does anyone know anything about her? Is she still alive/writing? Any other pen names?
There are over 400 pages of this? The mind boggles. Thanks for the best review I’ve read in years.
@Carol – Not even 1993 makes this make sense, does it?
I suppose to each her or his own taste, but seriously….
what a hot mess
I literally slid sideways off my stool when I read “A Whiter Shade of Tail”.
SB Sarah, can I second the request for you to review “The Forever Kiss”? Because I am insanely curious about the rest of this woman’s work, but not quite ready to, uh, dive in again. But it’s set at a place called Sangbourne Manor. The hero is called Dar St. Onge. Seriously, how can you resist?
Also: thank you to everyone who read and commented.
Also also: Thea Devine has a webpage here: http://www.theadevine.com/ and apparently that is her real name. I’ll be honest, I’m kinda jealous.
I spit ice cream on my laptop screen.
I think Thea Devine (and her contemporary Susan Johnson) may be why those little calico book covers were made and sold at church bazaars back in the 90s. One did not buy their books while book shopping with friends from their Tuesday night writing group. Just saying.
Well done! I was caught snickering on a conference call this afternoon.
@CateM:
Oh, so weak, in the face of temptation. I should surprise Red Headed Girl with a few copies too.
That sounds like a trainwreck and I’m so, so glad you reviewed it. I haven’t laughed so much in days.
I spent two whole days thinking “anal harem” was a 60s band before working out that 1) that was actually Procol Harum and 2) Hey, this book should have been called A Whiter Shade of Tail.
SHUT DOWN THE INTERWEBS WE HAVE A WINNER
It’s 7:30 am and I’m laughing out loud only a half an hour after getting up. Thanks for this. I wish I could point to one thing that sent me over the top but your entire review has me on sensory overload. I’m bookmarking this for a blue day.
A Whiter Shade of Tail
OMG
love