So there’s your game.
The process of assembling the ethnic stereotypes really brought home to me how truly ignorant, obnoxious, and offensive this woman’s writing is. This isn’t Mark Twain faithfully rendering the language of the antebellum south and the Black slaves who inhabited it – it’s not even clear that this novel took place in a time of slavery, only that it was pre-industrial.
This isn’t even Stephen King letting loose with a string of racial epithets spoken in the head of a black sub-protagonist by an evil hotel trying to keep him away.
This is an ignorant, unskilled, suburban white hack who has likely never so much as heard a live black person speak in any context…and from the way she writes dialogue, she’s never heard anyone else speak either. Her non-white characters are a throwback of every advance past stereotype our collective consciousness has taken in the last century.
I really didn’t start this article to write some hard-liberal politically correct diatribe, and that’s really not who I am (ed. note: in the language of 2009 “hard liberal” would have been accurate, but “politically correct” never has been and still isn’t. I don’t avoid the use of slurs to be politically correct; I do it to not be a dick. I don’t care in the least what people think is “politically correct” or not. -jh, 2021). My own background is a mix of over a half-dozen ethnicities that I know of, including Black, at least two Native American tribes, and several flavors of European ancestry. I’m not averse to a little off-color (no pun intended) humor now and then, as long as there’s a purpose to it and it’s not just some stupid racist ‘joke.’ I certainly have no problem with honest, historically-accurate portrayals of non-white culture – the Geers, for instance, write some really excellent historical Native American fiction.
But this woman legitimately offends me, and I just don’t even use that concept very often.
Worst of all, this is just one facet of many that make this woman a walking offense to the concept of movable type. The dialogue of her white characters isn’t any less ridiculous, forced, unnatural, and just plain crappy – it’s just lacking the colloquial quality that marks her as not only an idiot, but a bigot too.
But it’s not just the nearly belligerent bigotry in her portrayals of minorities or her utter inability to write dialogue that doesn’t sound like a poorly-written play for grade-schoolers. Every character is a bad cliche. Every sentence she writes looks like it came straight from the diary of a slightly insane Nazi boy of thirteen whose entire concept of female sexuality is based on Porky’s movies.
And do I really need to point out the patently ugly, sick, and thoroughly evil nature of constantly portraying women who are first forced into sex, and then fall deeply and forever in love with their attackers?
People play ‘cruel tricks,’ hands ‘flail,’ color ‘drains’ from faces, blue ‘swims’ in eyes, everything is ‘damnable.’ Lips are inevitably ‘forced apart’ by tongues, there is always the obligatory ‘tangle of limbs,’ and slight, spineless women are ‘swept up’ into bulging, rippling, bronzed, shining, chiseled, heroic arms. Heartbeats thunder, one always ‘rises’ from a bed, heat rises in loins, hearts skip beats, and everyone is almost afraid of the next paragraph.
Whether you’re like me and read basically anything that crosses your path, or you’re a romance novel aficionado, I can not say it strongly enough: avoid this woman’s “writing” like the plague. She is the ultimate embodiment of every bad cliche in the genre.
Enjoy your drinks. Responsibly.
