The Publisher’s Bad Blurb Prize

The Literary Review makes an annual Bad Sex Award for really, really badly written sex scenes in novels which may have other merits but when it comes to sex, none at all.

They should add a Bad Blurb prize. Bad Blurbs are quotes cut and pasted onto book jackets and sometimes onto front pages which are meant to attract readers to the book but in fact display a certain inappropriateness for the book they supposedly blurb.

Until this week I had only accumulated two examples, books which have been previously reviewed on this Blog:

Novel: Alex Preston In Love and War

Publisher: Faber 2017

Relevant plot summary: Hero dies horribly at hands of Gestapo; heroine dies in Auschwitz

Bad Blurb: selected by the Publisher from GQ magazine which tells us that it’s a book for the beach, “The perfect read to pair with that first sundowner”

 

Comment: Gin and Auschwitz, anyone?

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Novel: Megan Hunter The End We Start From

Publisher:  Pan Macmillan 2018

Relevant Fact: Under 20 000 words, disguised by using wide spacing, sixteen pages of end materials, and thick paper

Bad Blurb: “I read it in one sitting” (a breathless Hannah Kent of Burial Rites fame)

Comment: How could one not?

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But this week I can add a third one:

Novel: Sally Vickers, The Librarian

Publisher: Penguin 2018

Relevant plot summary: Mills & Boon. I gave up at page 155-6 where Doctor finally kisses Nurse, sorry, Librarian, “ ‘ What would you wish for, Sylvia?’ But he had stooped and was gathering her body to his, so she didn’t answer./ “I have wanted to do that since I met you in the foundry”’

Bad Blurb: “Vickers writes of relationships with undaunted clarity” (Adam Phillips, no less, who sold the book to me)

Comment: Phillips was reviewing another book by Vickers, Cousins. But in any case there surely has to be a sotto voce continuation to his phrase: “ undaunted clarity as if Freud, modernism, the War, post-Modernism had never happened”. "Undaunted clarity" from the pen of Adam Phillips  gives the game way. It is something no longer available to us, outside the world of Mills & Boon novels.

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Added 2 August 2020:

I have now discovered a variant on the genre. I just bought a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Nabokov's Ada or Ardor. The spare pages at the end are used to advertise other books by Nabokov. This is how Penguin introduces its edition of Lolita:

"Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze ......"

It continues. [ For those who haven' read the novel, her name is Dolores Haze].