Tag: stereotypes

Ain’t No Party Like A Savage Party

(Originally published 24-April-2009. At that time, unbeknownst to me, Ms. Edwards’ career had – recently, then – been basically ended by plagiarism charges. She published two more novels after this article was written. As Stephen King said, no great loss.)

I’m a reader. I read everything, from the Bible to the Qur’an to the Book of Mormon to Dianetics; from Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb to Shakespeare, Dickens, Lovecraft, Poe, King, Heinlein, Straub, Bradbury, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Mark Twain…if it’s written down, I’ll read it. I don’t care if it’s a multi-volume novel or the back of a cereal box.

This rather undiscriminating approach led me to discover what may possibly be the worst published writer I have ever read: Cassie Edwards. The fact that this woman gets paid to write is a stunning and mortal indictment of everything the western world stands for. This is the kind of author who makes you think “Jesus, I could be on the USA Today Best Seller list, if this is the criterion!”

I’ve read exactly two of her books. Part of one was called ‘Savage (Something),’ and it bears the distinction of being the first book ever in my life that I just could not finish. It was that bad. Cookie-cutter plot, stereotyped characters that are so poorly-written that you’re not just offended at the racial stereotypes (we’ll get in to those below), but simply at the fact that someone got paid to write this crap.  The other part of one was pretty much the same thing.  And the one in my hand right now.

I’m sure she’s probably a nice lady and all (this is me trying to be too nice. she’s not a nice lady, nice ladies aren’t raging bigots generating billions of dollars in revenue by perpetuating horrible and ignorant stereotypes -jh, 2019) but this woman is to literature what Pauly Shore is to brain surgery. She’s so predictable and cliche that she doesn’t just get one drinking game, she gets a whole party.

Disclaimer: Please Drink Responsibly. I emphatically do not condone or endorse the levels of alcohol you will ingest if you take this game seriously. I mean it. Alcohol kills people. Be careful.

That said…on with the show!

The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game – EZ-Mode~!

This one’s simple: Open any Cassie Edwards novel. If you see an ellipsis – you know, the three dots? Like…this? Drink. This is actually how I came up with this idea – I found one of her “books” in a box, and thought, “I bet I can open this to ANY random page and find at least one ellipsis.” I tried literally a dozen times, and succeeded every time. I’m holding one of her books in my hands right now, I’ll test the theory just for you! The title of this book is “Her Forbidden Pirate.”

(Safety note: I was tempted as I constructed this to say ‘drink for each ellipsis.’ DON’T. Do not even think about it. You’ll die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the night. I promise. Even if you’re playing the game with water.)

1. Page 250-251. Ellipses: 1
2. Page 296-297. Ellipses: 4
3. Page 72-73. Ellipses: 0~! (For your party, now pass the book to the next person)
4. Page 346-347. Ellipses: 7
5. Page 196-197 (weird the 6-7 keeps hitting). Ellipses: 1
6. Page 368-269. Ellipses: 8
7. Page 162-163. Ellpses: 15. FIFTEEN FLIPPIN ELLIPSES IN TWO PAGES! THERE ARE MORE DOTS IN HERE THAN A DAMNED SEURRAT PAINTING! I bet if you ripped all these pages out of the book and pasted them on cardboard when you back away from it it’ll look like the old grayscale newspaper photos.
8. Page 360-361. Ellipses: 2
9. Page 126-127. Ellipses: 4
10. Page 270-271. Ellipses: 5

So that’s the EZ-mode game. I promise you, if you have enough alcohol you will not be able to play this game for an hour without getting so hammered that you can’t SEE the friggin dots anymore.

Expert Mode: General

This is a little tougher, because it requires you to actually read this useless garbage. Fortunately you’ll be blackout drunk before you finish, so you won’t remember any of it.

Step 1: Head to a used bookstore and find the Cassie Edwards novels. Close your eyes and select one at random. If it has the word ‘Savage’ in the title, find a designated driver.

Step 2: Drinks are assigned for each of the following ‘plot’ points. I’ve broken these up into three categories: “Savage,” “Non-Savage,” and “General.” The “Savage” points apply only to books with “Savage” in the title, because all of Edwards’ “Savage” books apparently revolve around some bizzaro-world version of Native Americans, and there are some special things to go with that. The “Non-savage” list applies, obviously, to her filthy and witless wanderings outside of the ‘ME JOHN BIG TREE’ sub-genre. “General” applies to both.

• If the female protagonist is under 18, drink.
• If the female protagonist is a virgin, drink.
• If the female protagonist is a pure, untouched virgin, unfamiliar with the ‘sight’ of a man, yet cheerfully casts off her clothes and schtupps the male protagonist out of his wits within the first five chapters, drink.
• If the female protagonist’s mother is dead at the beginning of the novel, drink.
• If she’s not dead at the start, but dies before chapter 8, drink. Drink twice if the female protagonist is absent for the death because she’s illicitly snuck off to be with the male protagonist.
• If the female protagonist’s father is an outrageous bastard, drink.
• Drink every time you see the word “throbbing” in connection with any part of the male anatomy (especially that part).
• Drink every time a bosom heaves.
• If the female protagonist has a friend who is described as “not beautiful in the conventional sense,” “thick,” “bawdy,” or some other variant of “unattractive but we’re trying to be performatively polite about it,” drink.
• If the female protagonist is raped by the male protagonist and enjoys it, drink (I’m not even kidding).
• Any time a phrase describes something that simply cannot happen while simultaneously invoking a bad romance novel cliche, drink. (Example, “‘Oh, Royce, I love you so!’ she sighed breathlessly.” You can’t sigh breathlessly. You have to breathe to sigh.)
• If the male protagonist is cast as some sort of criminal – pirate, grifter, highwayman, etc. – drink. Drink again if it turns out he’s not really a pirate/whatever.
• If there is a subplot suggesting that the male and female protagonists may actually be brother and sister, drink twice. If it turns out they actually are, drink twice more. If they continue having sex in spite of that, please consider donating a bottle of MD 20/20 to the “Help Cassie Edwards Move Home To MygoshijustLOVEmyfamily, Southwest Virginia” fund.
• If the male protagonist’s muscles ‘ripple’ at any point, drink.
• If the male protagonist is described at any point as ‘chiseled,’ drink.
• If the word ‘loins’ appears referring to anything but a steak, drink.
• Any time a character speaks out loud to themselves in place of a block of thought, drink. (I’m convinced that Edwards is aware of no other literary style with which to render thought.)
• Any time a sex act is described as ‘filling her,’ drink.
• Any time female genitalia is described as ‘her wetness,’ ‘her dampness,’ ‘her moisture,’ or ‘her heat,’ drink. Drink twice if the word “dewy” or “dew” is used to redundantly describe the aforementioned moisture.
• Any time male genitalia is described as ‘his hardness,’ ‘his need,’ or ‘his love,’ drink.
• If the ‘plot’ of the book involves finding lost treasure, a misplaced inheritance, or rightfully reclaiming one’s birthright, drink.
• If the female protagonist’s father dies, drink. Drink twice if he’s dead before Chapter 7.
• Every time you see a snippet of verse from an obscure poet that reads suspiciously like doggerel from a Hallmark card, drink. Drink twice if it’s the preface to the first chapter! (Thanks Katie!)
• If the mother or father of the female protagonist turns out not to be her mother or father, drink. Drink again if her mother was kidnapped by her father but decided to stay with him of her own free will because she just loves the bad boys.
• Any time you see dialogue that rolls off the tongue like a brick – thick, stilted, unnatural, heavy, and in no way related to any mode of speech ever employed by a human being, drink. (Bonus points may be involved; see the ‘Non-Savage’ section)

Racism Bonus Mode! ‘Savage’ vs. non-‘Savage’

‘Savage’

• Any time a Native American starts a sentence with “Ho,” drink.
• Any time a Native American speaks in his ‘native’ language, which is rendered as a series of italicized syllables with dashes between them, drink. If he repeats the sentence in English, drink again. If the phrase turns out to be a secret nickname for the female protagonist that ‘translates’ to anything involving flowers, sunrises, does, or bodies of water, drink twice more.
• Any time a Native American’s skin is described as “bronzed,” drink. Drink again if it’s “shining.”
• If the female protagonist has a medical condition caused by an obscure combination of herbs assembled by the male protagonist, drink.
• If the male protagonist (and the Native American is always the male protagonist) is described as a ‘chief,’ ‘brave,’ ‘shaman,’ or ‘medicine man,’ drink.
• If the male protagonist at any time wears a loincloth, drink.
• If the male protagonist reluctantly but necessarily kills the father of the female protagonist, drink.
• If the female protagonist is in a near-death situation and the male protagonist revives her by singing or invoking any form of smoke, drink.
• If at any series of concurrent events the male protagonist is described as carrying a bow and arrow, hatchet, AND machete, drink.
• If at any time the male protagonist is depicted wearing a headband, drink.
• If the female protagonist is assimilated into the male protagonists tribe, at first treated with loathing and suspicion by the other tribeswomen but charming them within two chapters, drink.
• If the male protagonist already has a wife, drink. If he maintains two ‘homes’ in order to avoid any suggestion of actual kinkiness so as to avoid offending the strange people who actually enjoy reading this crap, drink again.

Non-‘Savage’

• If any character of African descent is featured with a name ending in ‘-i,’ ‘-ey’ or ‘-ie,’ drink
• Drink once if any Black character says one of the following:
  • afadin’ (“fading,” especially when used as a euphemism for sleep or death)
  • any variant of “you be” or “I be” when the verb should be “am” or “are”
  • fo’ (“for”)
  • y’all. Drink twice if “y’all” is used to refer to a single person. Drink three times if it’s rendered as “y’all” and “ya’ll” on the same page. (I’m not kidding. Page 250 of Her Forbidden Pirate.)
  • Reference to either protagonist as “miss,” “missus,” “mister.”
  • Drink twice if “mistah” or “mistuh” is involved.
  • Toast Stephen Douglass if “Massa” makes an appearance.
  • ‘Fore (“before”). Bonus drink if this appears in the same book as “fo’” (I’m not kidding.)
  • “Fret” in place of “worry”
  • afta (“after”)
  • sho (“sure,” usually immediately following “fo’.” A legitimate quote: “He’ll be fit to be tied, Massa Saul will. He’ll come afta’ us fo’ sho’!”)
  • “Land sakes”
  • Yes’m
  • and of course, the ultimate in badly-written dialogue for black characters, “sho’ nuff.”
    
• Drink if you can’t quite figure out whether the Black characters are slaves or servants.  Bonus drink if it’s obvious that they are slaves, but the word ‘slave’ is never used.
• Drink if any reference is made to whipping.
• Drink twice if it involves “whuppin’,” “whupped,” or “whup.”
• Bonus drink if this “whipping” business is referenced, close together, by the same character in at least two different ways. (“Massa he goan whup me, I’s goan get a whippin’ fo’ sho’!”)
• Drink if a Black character refers to themselves in the third person.
• Bonus drink if the character adds the descriptive, “Ol’” to their names, as in “Ol’ Mazie’s goan fix you right up!”
• Drink three times if this Steppin’ Fetchit pantomime of Blackness offends you even though you’re as Caucasian as Al Gore.
  • Add a couple of you’re politically conservative and still offended.
  • Add one more if you or any living relative under 65 regularly uses perjorative slang for Black people (e.g. the “n-word”) and yet you somehow manage to STILL be offended at how casually racist this woman is. I am. I’m almost offended at myself for even mentioning all of this, but this woman’s insane caricatures of ethnic minorities need to be drug out into the light where they can be properly examined before being beat to death.
    
• This next one is a little tough. Make a two-shot cocktail for the whole party for every page (NOT every instance, see the safety warning above) where you can find linguistic anachronisms in which a black character jumps back and forth between badly-rendered and obnoxious colloquial “black” speech, and badly-rendered, unnatural, and artificial non-colloquial speech. The only way to really explain this is to quote some of it. Please note that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the quotes in the list below is spoken by the same character, the same who spoke the “fit to be tied” sentence a few bullets up:
  • “Massa Bryce will arrive soon, posing as a Doctor Jamison. There is a new doctor in town with the name Jamison, one Massa Saul hadn’t met yet. Massa Bryce will disable the true Doctor Jamison momentarily until Massa Bryce will have time to get you on his ship.”
  • “Miss Natalie, your father depends on me to keep a watch on you while he’s gone…Land sakes, if anything’d every happen to you while he was gone, he’d take a bullwhip to me fo’ sho’…probably until I’d neva’ walk again.”
  • “You’ll stay on the estate grounds, won’t you?…I don’t like the look in your eyes. They be adancin’, Miss Natalie. Since your return from your outing yesterday you’ve been a different young lady. Did you by chance make the acquaintance of a man? Is a man why you are behavin’ so strangely…so defiantly?”
  • “Old Tami ain’t gonna do nothin’ to stir up trouble for Miss Natalie…The years have made you my own.” The idea here is to celebrate the insane juxtaposition of the oh-so-richly offensive colloquial “Black folk”-speak, or proto-AVE or what the hell ever nonsense this woman is trying to stuff into these poor caricature’s faces, often in the same sentence as speech rendered, by the same character, in such precise diction that it seems unlikely even a classically-trained butler would employ it. We’re not talking about code-switching; we’re talking about glaring continuity errors in writing, aside from the outrageous stereotyping

Conclusions & Further Analysis

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.