Romance Reviewed: Gangrenous Gunslinger
Title: Dangerous Virtues: Chastity
Perpetrator: Elaine Barbieri
Alternative Title: Missouri Mansweat, Rustle My Cattle, The Parson’s Prong, Mexican Whores Are Not Really People, Dude Where’s My Cow?
Genre: Wild West Romance. I don’t know why I did this to myself. I really don’t. I can only conclude I’m an incurable masochist.
A word about Westerns - I occasionally swing by an online writer’s forum, right? I was pottering around on the threads quite merrily and noticed a thread about erotica. The forum God Mod was holding forth in his own way about how erotica is really just flowery porn, nobody puts any thought into it and generally being quite rude and dismissive. So I had to laugh myself sick when I found out that his professional career was confined to Westerns.
There’s kind of a food chain of pulp writers, much as there is a food chain of geeks (D&D enthusiasts may be lame, but they get to look down on people who speak Klingon and so on - and everyone looks down on furries.) and Western writers are the furries of the pulp fiction foodchain. Right at the bottom, being mocked and derided, because their kink will never be okay.
We love them. They make us feel so much better about ourselves. I may have come fresh from writing a scene featuring a string bikini, sun lotion, a large courgette and a lurking paparrazo but I can sleep tight at night serene in the knowledge that I have never descended to the literary equivalent of line dancing.
Our Heroine: Chastity Lawrence. Being named Chastity she gives up her cherry on page 191. Naming girls after virtues is never a good idea - they have too much to live up to. While playing the Sims2 I named a brood of daughters after virtues and hilarity ensued. Faith majored in Physics, Mercy was always picking fights, Patience had none, Charity was an avaricious bitch, Hope was always in the throes of a nervous breakdown and Temperance had three different boyfriends and squatters rights at her parents’ cocktail bar before she was even out of her teens.
Chastity’s nomenclature is a plot device, you see. I suspect her story is the last of the ‘Dangerous Virtues’ series, which is why the book feels so phoned in. She’s searching for her sisters, Honesty and Purity. (Honesty is a crooked cardsharp, apparently. God knows what Purity gets up to in her spare time but it probably involves safewords. And maybe courgettes.) All three sisters got separated and orphaned when their wagon was smashed apart in a swollen river. Fortunately their parents had fitted them with plot devices before they were half drowned - all three wear golden heart shaped lockets apparently equipped with some kind of special Sibling Sense. Chastity claims she can feel her sisters’ hearts beating when she holds the locket in her fist, which is how she knows they’re alive. (Their Dad’s name was Clay, allegedly. I don’t buy it. Pulsating lockets? It was obviously Voldemort doing a spot of freelancing.)
She is a redhead - typically. What is with romance writers and redheads? Is it so the hero can grasp the heroine’s flailing fists and say stuff like ‘I see all the fire in you is not just in your hair, my passionate beauty!’? She’s tall, she’s slim, she’s got big tits and men love her and women envy her. Only not at first, because Chastity is hot in the ‘But Miss Jones, you’re beautiful!’ way. That’s right. She turns up having been raised by maiden aunts (As opposed to unmaiden aunts in the porn business - of which I am one.) with all her ‘womanly proportions’ squished away in a black dress and wearing a pair of very unflattering spectacles. The hero finds her ‘annoying’ until he realises she has big boobs. Deep, huh?
Our Hero: Reed Farrell, Bounty Hunter! Really.Only he’s in disguise. He’s disguised as a Bounty Hunter and he’s going to sneak into Jabba’s Palace at the dead of night, break Han out of the carbon chamber and plant one on him…no, okay, he’s not. But it would have been funny. He’s actually disguised as a preacher man with a big bushy beard and when he first meets the heroine he’s got a suppurating bullet wound in his leg, which naturally awakens her nurturing insticts.
He clings to his cover and tells the doctor that he accidentally got caught in a gunfight, but the truth is that “He had instigated that gunfight with three simple words: ‘I’m taking you in’.”
No wonder he got shot. The whole ‘twenty paces, turn and on the count of three DRAW!’ schtick gets a whole lot more dangerous if you can’t count to four. Or five, if you discount apostrophes.
Reed also has a vendetta, as a substitute for a personality, as there are rocks in this book with more personality. Apparently he was in love with some bird named Jenny and she got pwned in a cattle stampede. And ever since then he’s been hunting down evil cattle rustlers because they killed his Jenny. Actually cows technically killed his Jenny, but a vindictive bounty hunter with a vendetta against all bovines would result in this book being called ‘Reed Farrell’s Big Barbecue Bounty’ and containing forty three different ways to cook ribs. MURDEROUS RIBS!
But never mind. He’s blond, burly and has cold blue eyes. He also smells remarkably nice, apparently. When Chastity helps haul him to his feet after he’s been lying around for days recovering from an infected bullet wound she finds herself trembling at the ‘pure male scent of him’. Scent is what wafts from a lady’s perfumed throat, on a cool spring breeze when the cherry trees are in blossom, from a sizzling barbeque roasting the remains of murderous bastard cows. I think stink is probably the word the author is looking for. Stench. Reek. Pong. Honk.
He’s had a fever, albeit a romance novel fever, which are the ones where you sweat a bit, roll around and moan plot points out in your delirium. Not a real fever, which involves shuddering, cold sweats, hot sweats and vomiting like an hallucinating human lawn sprinkler. But a fever nonetheless. There was sweating involved as he fended off the beginnings of gangrene - which is not the most fragrant of ailments what with the tissue death and stink of rot.
Elaine, what are you thinking? Use your imagination, woman. Being bedridden for three days, even in this modern age of soap and showers, makes most people smell like a landfill marinated in BO. A landfill with really bad breath at that. Scent? On your way, love - he’d gag a bloody maggot.
Moustache twirlers: This needed a category since there’s always an evil rapist somewhere in these books. He wants his way with the heroine. He’s infatuated with her. He’ll do anything to get her in his power but he won't be satisfied with raping her - he wants her to surrender to him.
Which is pretty much what the hero wants to do too, which is confusing. The difference is that the hero loves her, you see. Date rape is fine, apparently. No doesn’t have to mean no if you’re in love.
What the villain feels is lust, which is dirty. Everyone knows that.
Anyway, enter the villain - William Jefferson Morgan. Interesting choice of name. Close, as they say, but no cigar.
I don’t know what Will does exactly. He fannies about with a series of stooges who he occasionally shoots and unmanfully diddles a knife wielding seventeen year old Mexican whore named Conchita. You know how you can tell he’s evil? He doesn’t waste time on foreplay when he’s sticking it to Conchita - doesn’t ‘fondle the bud of her passion’ before cramming it in there.
Oh, and he shoots her. And she dies.
“The thought occurred to her, as the light rapidly waned, that a woman who was unloved really had no life at all. She did not resist as her breathing ceased.”
And with that, several million single female romance readers settled down to pen ‘Goodbye cruel world’ letters and stick their heads in their gas cookers. Poor Conchita. I kind of liked her crazy, knife-wielding, Spanish-language insult spitting, chilli-cooking, ethnic stereotype ways. Let’s say she never died and fucked off to California where she created a taco and tortilla franchise and died aged 102, lying on a leopard-print waterbed covered in banknotes, a 24 year old toyboy still rutting between her wrinkled thighs as her body cooled. And let’s say her last thought was ‘I’ve had five husbands, four kids, I’ve got seven grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren and this poolboy attended to my clit for half an hour before mounting. Yay me! I’m the best!’
Goodnight, sweet princess, and may flights of oiled and lissome cabana boys sing thee to thy rest.
Anyway, yeah - villain. He wants to bone the heroine, as they all do. And captures her so that Stinky Dyscalculalia boy has to come rescue her. As usual.
The Plot: I’ve given most of this away already. Suffice to say, it’s crap. Chastity meets gangrenous fake-parson Reed on the train out West and helps him off the train. Whereupon she is stranded in the backwoods of Missouri in nothing but the clothes she’s standing up in. She takes him to a doctor and the doctor assumes they are man and wife and undresses his patient in front of her in a way that makes her go all wibbly at the knees. Because incipient gangrene is hot.
He hides her spectacles in order to keep her with him and use her to reinforce his cover story about going deep into Injun country to a mission. She pisses him off but then he clocks her jugs and realises he’s in love with her.
They take a wagon out to the mission and the wagon gets swamped in a river, leading to Chastity reliving her childhood trauma of half-drowning. Then for some reason as soon as they haul one another out of the river they make with the sexy times. Rather than drying out their belongings or taking care of the spooked horses, which you would think would be priority number one when your horses and transport are the thing between you and almost certain death in a barren and unforgiving land.
Evil nasty stalky villain is evil, nasty and stalky. He steals some cattle and tries to brand them in the rain in a series of scenes which make no sense or point whatsoever.
Chastity finds out that Reed has been lying to her about being a parson and that he’s actually Boba Fett then traipses off angrily into the arse-end of nowhere, in the dark, sans spectacles and gets less than a hundred yards from the wagon before tumbling down a slope and knocking herself out. This is my favourite part of the whole book.
And this is why men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses - because girls who wear glasses are less likely to be unconscious at the bottoms of ditches, thus dispensing with the need for coercion or roofies. Girls who wear glasses can see where they’re fucking going.
Chastity gets captured by evil nasty stalky villain, gets a gunshot wound to the shoulder in the process and is glared at by a jealous Mexican prostitute. Conchita tells her she’s seen a locket like hers on a skanky whore who cheated at cards and Chastity knows she has to be talking about her crooked sister Honesty.
Some stooges and Conchita get shot. Reed and Chastity develop ESP and communicate telepathically, or something. Chastity has been told Reed is dead but doesn’t believe it because she won’t believe it until she sees it with her own eyes. Which is a sensible point of view if you’re not so myopic you can’t see two feet in front of you and you missed the two for one offer at Specsavers.
Reed stages the obligatory daring rescue and then an Indian brave comes to their aid and kills nasty villain Morgan. And the Indian brave turns out to be Purity’s husband Pale Wolf, which ties up the story nicely. Then Reed and Chastity get married and Honesty turns up with her husband - ‘a Texas ranger who always gots his man’ and the three sisters, reunited at last, ride away into the sunset. Yippeee ki yay, etc.
Steamy Bodice Ripping Bits:
Their lovemaking grew more frantic, more impassioned. Her yearning became almost more than she could bear…
You get the impression that the author really can’t be bothered with this? Yeah. Me too.
Touching her soul with a tenderness so sweet and acute she was almost undone, he raised her to a plane of sustained emotion where the joy seared as deeply as pain. There was no indulgence he withheld - save one.
I think she’s referring to his cock, although I can’t be sure.
The moment Chastity gives it up deserves to be recorded in full as an example of everything that it really, really fucking stupid about romance novels. All of you who greeted the loss of your virginity with the words ‘Whoops’, ‘ow’ or ‘is it in yet?’ prepare to be very very annoyed indeed.
Her words were swallowed by a gasp as Reed slid inside her. Chastity closed her eyes. The brief stab of pain was overwhelmed by Reed’s grunt of pleasure as he settled hot and deep within her. She heard him groan softly as her body closed fully around him, and she clutched him close. She felt his anticipation growing and her own swelled as well. He moved hesitantly, then with an increasing passion until she had no thought but the moment, until there was no breath that did not speak Reed’s name, until the colours assaulting her mind became a brilliant cataclysm that exploded brightly before her eyes as Reed carried her with him to ecstactic reward.
The Technicolor money shot! Whee! I didn’t think that existed outside the realms of badfic. Obviously it does.
This reveals some further interesting things about romance novels - a consistent pattern I have yet to be seen deviated from.
1) The hero needn’t be a virgin. The heroine must be.
2) She’s got to be a hardcore virgin - a complete never-been-kissed virgo intacta complete with hymen so that the hero knows he’s her very first when he pops her like a tube of Pringles.
3) And naturally she comes like a train her first time out because it is impossible to have bad sex with someone you love.
What’s Right With It:
Conchiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitaaaaaaaaaaaa! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Also there’s a gift certificate printed on cardboard slap bang in the middle of this book so it falls open at page 191 - which conveniently happens to be the dirty bit. Thus saving you the trouble of reading the rest of it.
What’s Wrong With It: The piece of cardboard is the most convincing and interesting character in this book. Except for Conchita. But she had to die for the awful crime of being more interesting than the heroine.