There are many entertainment prizes given out each year, but none is quite as amazing as the Bad Sex in Fiction award, selected from a range of surprisingly legitimate novels published over the previous 12 months. (Past winners include Tom Wolf and the venerated historical writer Sebastian Faulks — sometimes good writers just can’t hack sex.)
This year’s winner came from a book called “The City of Devi” by an Indian-born writer named Manil Suri, and it stands out for taking interstellar sex metaphors to impossible places. A horrifying passage from Woody Guthrie also made the shortlist, as did a selection from Jonathan Grimwood’s “The Last Banquet,” which I personally feel should have taken the prize.
After reading these gems, I decided to challenge myself and the esteemed Chris Eggertsen to write the worst sex scenes we possible could to see if we could beat the beautifully bad passages. How’d we do? You be the judge.
‘Here’s the winner, from a book called “The City of Devi” by Manil Suri:
“The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun”s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”
And from a posthumously-published novel from the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, called “House of Earth”:
“So magnified and so keen were her feelings that her inner nerves could even feel the bumps, the ridges, the pimples, the few stray hairs along the shaft of his male rod.”
And my personal favorite, from “The Last Banquet” by Jonathan Grimwood:
“In my mouth her nipple turned from strawberry to deep raspberry but the taste I wanted was missing. I had sweat and what had to be soap from washing her dress or herself. Reaching behind me, I found the Brie and broke off a fragment, sucking her nipple through it.”
Liana Maeby’s offering:
“She arched her back onto the white silk pillows, her angelic lips parted in anticipation of ecstasy. Feathers exploded in the air and cascaded onto her body, playing her like a harp. Her breasts were small, cherubic, but her pale torso vibrated and hummed with celestial grace. I penetrated her with my pitchfork.
Hark!“
Chris Eggertsen’s offering:
“He entered her like a restless finger into a hungry sea anemone, her tentacles enveloping his engorged fleshy monolith and drawing him inside her salty cavity, which foamed and churned like a gaping, insatiable mouth. In turn he wrapped his frothing, desperate lips around her pulsating nipple and began to suck, like a piglet at its mother’s raw distended teet, drawing nourishment from her heaving succulent bosom whilst running his searching, frantic fingers through the curly black mane of hair, on her back.“