The annual Bad Sex in Fiction awards are one of those situations where the winner is the loser. Nobody wants to take home the annual prize for a cringeworthy sex scene, which has in the past been “awarded” to authors such as Ben Okri, Tom Wolfe, and Morrissey.
So for some authors it was a relief when the prizes were canceled this year by the editors of Literary Review, who reasoned that 2020 has been awful enough without subjecting readers to regrettable prose.
But the good people at Electric Literaturemissed the awards, so they decided to “fill the gap” (their words) by asking a group of authors to write deliberately awful sex scenes.
And did the authors ever deliver.
Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, offered a very 2020 sex scene that takes place over Zoom, with this vivid description: “Evelyn lowered the camisole and released her fruit. Here was the ripe flesh; here were the small, hard pits. The ring light ringed both breasts in rings of light.”
Author Courtney Maum (Touch) contributed a passage about a work-from-home couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. “My lover’s tongue tastes like coffee grinds and desperation: I swallow his tongue like a stimulus check,” she writes. “The breakfast bell has rung.”
Amber Sparks (And I Do Not Forgive You) imagined a teacher-student affair with these lines: “She was the gazelle and he the apex predator, and together they rode the hotel bed like a savannah: he consuming, she submitting. As she moved through this dance of beasts, he was exhausted, invigorated, insatiable. It was like fucking Noah’s Ark.”
And Open Me author Lisa Locascio offered a story about two “disruptive tech CEOs” making love, featuring the deathless sentence, “She longed for him to fill her Venusian canyon with his hot love lava.”
It’s like the old saying: Sex is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s still…really, really bad.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
