And Someone Wins Bad Sex In Unclear Headline Prize

Coren Wins Bad Sex in Fiction Prize

For a second there I pictured poor Coren winning a night in a hotel room with my lunchlady from West Elementary School in Tooele. (And she was wearing leather and carrying both a whip and a garden hose.) Then I remembered it was that time of the year again. This year's "winner" of the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize is Giles Coren, the author of Winkler:

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

That's one athletic dick, but I can't quite picture how it leaps around "like a shower dropped in an empty bath". (Showers leap? Shower heads stay still, unless they're broken; and the water doesn't leap, it falls. He did say the shower "dropped" in the empty bath, but dropping is a different motion from leaping, and since when were showers characterized by their tendency to drop? Sorry, I'm spending way too much time in this simile.) Still, the protagonist did manage to get enough control over his member to make the sign of the Z on her chest.

Coren's prose reads like the porn spam I sometimes get. I'm amazed that this passage managed to get past an agent, a battery of editors, and a publisher. (Unless, of course, the effect Coren was going for required him to write like a porn e-mail spammer.) Having read this, I'd say that Coren deserves to win a night with my lunchlady in an hourly-rate hotel room. We'll see if he, too, can make the sign of the Z.

Read all the other finalists here. Some pretty famous names are here, an indication of just how easy it is to foul up a sex scene. I guess Milan Kundera was on to something when he said that there is a certain--hard to take--comedy in sexuality. With all that rattling and wrenching, it's hard to take indeed.