Savannah doesn’t really want to go out with Mark, a guy from college, but he keeps asking. She agrees in the hope that he’ll leave her alone afterwards. But instead of a date, Mark has something else planned for her. He drugs her and sells her to an auction house, where she is sold to Adam.
Adam inherited his parents’ island, where they worked to master their dream of solving the human genetic code, making a weapon, which is strong yet undetectable. They make clone warrior men.
They can’t resist and make a set, using their son’s DNA too, giving him little brothers who all look exactly like him so he has someone to play with and someone to help him protect the island.
Many years after his parents’ tragic death at sea, Adam comes to realize that he wants a normal life. One where he would have a wife and a child. Maybe even several children. The children wouldn’t be exact copies of him. They would be unique, like his wife…
That’s less than half of the full blurb, but I think you get the picture. (h/t Curtis)
Because nothing says “normal life” like buying your “wife” from an auction house.
A comment I placed here a few hours ago seems to have vanished; I think it got caught in some kind of roll-back along with a bunch of others.
Yes, comments made overnight on Thursday/Friday were left behind in the server move. Your sacrifice is appreciated.
You’re supposed to leave something for the book.
And so, “many years” after Adam’s parents perish tragically at sea (obviously, not so tragically if they think buying people is okay…), old Adam has an epiphany and what, falls in love with the woman he bought? And does ANYBODY think that this plotline is remotely okay?
One person, demonstrably.
Hmm, yes, now it’s all coming back to me what I wrote. Well, yes—believe it or not—there is a market for books with as creepy and convoluted a plot as this, Hitch. As I said in my lost post, however, there’s no way a cover with just a picture of someone’s hands on a pregnant woman’s midriff even begins to be an adequate advertisement for this Stockholm Syndrome “romance” featuring sex slave trafficking, forced marriage, mad science, and apparently (if you read the rest of the summary at Amazon) some kinky spanking. The only potential readers this cover is likely to draw are pregnancy fetishists, and their first reaction upon reading the summary is likely to be “WTF!?”
If it were my (unenviable) job to market a story like this, my pitch for selling it would be “What if Frankenstein or The Island of Dr. Moreau or The Shadow Over Innsmouth or some such were actually a really twisted romance novel?” While I must admit the outcomes in romance novels are pretty much never in doubt, I’d also insist on putting a whole lot less of the actual plot in the page’s summary and sticking to the whole “driving question” advertising method. In other words, my sales page (and back cover) summary would be something like “Can she escape being made over into a baby factory for this admittedly handsome second-hand kidnapper with a mysteriously dark and tormented past? Does she even want to?” (Come to think of it, this might actually be an innovation in romance novels: a story in which the outcome really is in doubt, and the readers probably wouldn’t complain too much if she did ultimately escape from captivity and her “romance” with this guy despite being pretty conflicted about her unwholesome desires for him to the very end.)
genre is a marketing tool. Genre romance has ye olde happily ever after because the market expects that. It’s a promise from the genre to the reader. If you try to market a love story without ye olde HEA to the genre romance crowd, your targeted audience will feel cheated and never buy your books again. Genre romance doesn’t need “innovation” because love stories without HEAs do, in fact, exist in large numbers to satisfy any reader who yearns to read them.
Of course, other genres also make certain genre promises to their readers, in tropey, predictable ways that assure the reader *this* story will give them what they want.
That’s the point, to sell the story to the people who want to read it.
That said, I do agree neither the cover nor the blurb in this case are effectively aimed at the target audience. For which the target audience should probably be grateful.
Well, yes, happily ever after pretty much is the guaranteed outcome to any romance novel. I’m just saying in this case, the outcome could actually be in doubt because the ending where the “romance” doesn’t work out could be happily ever after too. “Then she and her children lived happily ever after, safely far away from the controlling creep who’d enslaved her and tried to make her into his baby factory. (He didn’t live happily ever after, but who cares? He’s the big bad villain of this story; screw that control freak anyway!)”
Actually, not to be argumentative, but not all romances end HEA. There is an entire “other” ending, with HEA–they fall in love and live HEA, but only for X time, because s/he dies. Or they realize that they’re in love, but one of them has to sacrifice their love, due to X. Or…they break up, for some (noble) reason.
Not all romances do, in fact, HEA off into the sunset. It’s not my cuppa, but over the last dozen years, I’ve learned this–this “not all HEA” from experts in the field. Who knew?
Well shit, I’m just a romance writer who hangs out on the reg with lots of other romance writers, what do I know.
Then you already know that. 🙂
There was a lot of interspecies hanky panky in The Shadow of Innsmouth. What if Lovecraft did an Anais Nin gig, anonymously writing erotica for select wealthy patrons?
Oddly enough, one of the revisions that Lovecraft ghostwrote — I think it was called “The Loved Dead” — had just about as many necrophilia allusions as one could get away with in print back then.
Oh, I forgot and I have Lovecraft’s revision of C.M. Eddy’s “The Loved Dead” in two Lovecraft collections (Dark Brotherhood, Horror in the Museum). Authorities in Indiana jumped on Weird Tales magazine for publishing that one.
Hoosiers just don’t know how to have a good time.
Ah yes, one of the other points made in my lost post was what kind of cover a book like this should have: my suggestion was that the cover designer should look to the lurid covers of trashy old pulp novels like this one for inspiration. See, something hilarious about those pulps is a lot of their publishers were trying to boost the erotic appeal of their products, but they weren’t allowed to get too explicit: about the most they could do was give heavily euphemistic descriptions of partial nudity (usually the topless female kind) with no actual pressing of skin against skin allowed. So they focused on vaguely BDSM-themed stuff like whips and chains and having the partially nude gals in question be strapped to operating tables or trapped in partially transparent containers in some mad scientist’s (or crazy quasi-Satanic cultist’s) lab; and, of course, they gave them the most suggestive titles they could as well, such as “New Girls For Satan’s Blood Ballet” and “At Night, The Claw Will Come To Caress Me” and the like.
Not at all coincidentally, these were exactly the kinds of stories H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries used to write in their time. Also—yes—I know all about the “interspecies hanky panky” indicated to be going on in The Shadow Over Innsmouth (a fish-banging story written well ahead of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water), which is why I said this book should be advertised more or less the same way. Basically, if you replaced the (rather indignant-looking) gal on the operating table on the linked pulp novel cover with the heavily pregnant protagonist of this story and updated everyone and everything else on it (e.g. the clothing and hairstyles of the characters and the lab equipment in the background) to reflect contemporary fashions and technology, you’d have a nigh-perfect cover for this trashy “romance” (erotica?) novel.