I’m a reader as much as I am a writer. Finding little nuggets of talent in the ocean of indie authors and their books is one of the high points of Kindle ownership. I’ve been disappointed more times than I’ve been thrilled but as Stephen King once said (I’m paraphrasing) “It is better to keep kissing and get your face slapped a few times than to give up altogether”. It is usually pretty easy to see why a book is a failure:  poor editing, flat characters, nothing happens or just plain bad writing. I just failed to finish a book that awakened me to another problem:  dishonesty.

I rarely stop reading a book or watching a movie — not matter how bad — until the bitter end. I feel I owe the book/film that, unless it is so bad it insults my intellect. I just put down a book that I could only make a third of the way through and left a strongly negative review on. I won’t mention the title here because my review is probably punishment enough. In this instance I think my bad review was justified (and I rarely give bad reviews, because…well, Karma). I felt the writer had been dishonest. Not with facts in the story (it was fiction) but with the story itself. Let me explain.

The story was a dark thriller about a male sociopath and the nice girl he becomes involved with. The nice girl is a bit of a Mary Sue (derogatory writing term for ‘too perfect’) but she is attracted to being a bit naughty and lets herself be swept up by the male character’s charms. Things quickly turn dark as the man becomes abusive, though incrementally as the story progresses. The abuse is what excites him and part of the abuse is being sexually aggressive. The aggressive sex part Mary Sue finds invigorating; the other aspects of his mis-treatments she finds scary. She is battling the Madonna/whore complex as a lot of women do. The story is poised to be frightening yet a bit titillating as things escalate.

The author, despite being as unafraid of profanity as I am, completely avoids anything but the most vague references to the sex acts taking place regularly between the two characters. The book is not intended to be erotica; I get that. But the rough, dominant sex is a key part of what drives the two characters. The author is apparently so frightened of writing even a PG rated sex scene that I actually was unsure several times if the two characters had actually had sex. I felt…not gypped, exactly…more like I had been lied to. I’m being sold on dark, depraved activity creating conflict between two characters and at key points in the story it is as if I had gone to the fridge during a commercial, only to find when I came back I had missed a key part of the plot. You can’t sell me the rough sex if you barely allude to it.

Dishonest.

Hey, I get it. Writing sex scenes — particularly edgy ones — isn’t the fun time most people think. Its uncomfortable; its supposed to be uncomfortable. If it weren’t, the reader won’t be made to feel uncomfortable. Part of storytelling is to make the reader squirm in their chair at times, and at other times cheer…or cry…or insert-emotion-here. If you can’t be honest — if you can’t write those things that you need to use to make the reader really experience your story — then you have no business writing that sort of fiction. Our readers deserve our honesty.