It never fails to amaze me how stupid some authors can be.

Meet Chancery Stone. Apparently, he/she/it is an author. And he/she/it thinks that incest is romantic.

Hi, I’m posting this for any of the (many) women who like reading male to male romances, or who enjoy stories about brothers with very close relationships.

The DANNY Quadrilogy is a 4 volume series of novels about the Jackson Moore brothers, part of a Cumbrian (English) farming family.

They have a forbidden relationship, thoroughly twisted out of shape by an abusive childhood. Things get horribly out of hand and the jealousies and rivalries end in murder.

Please be warned it is a sexually explicit tale with controversial content. However, for those people who live for intense emotional romances and who actively enjoy a challenging storyline then it will exceed your expectations.

Vloume 1 can only be purchased from the UK presently (although it is listed here on Amazon.com as an import, so you can view it here) but volume 2 is available here on .com. You can read more about the book at www.poisonpixie.com or, even more comprehensively at www.danny-is-god.com.

Thanks for your time.

That book sure sounds lovely and uplifting doesn’t it?

Listen, I know that there are people out there who dig this kind of crap, and I can just about live with it, but I certainly don’t want the romance genre tainted (yes, tainted) with incest stories.

Brother-and-brother sex, aint romantic. Father-and- daughter-sex, is also not romantic. Ask the children who are born deformed as a result of some of these unions.

Write it by all means, just don’t call it fucking romance.

The stupidity part isn’t from the above post by the way, it came from his handling of the readers who disagreed with him.

This comment was made a poster called Dog Lover. He/she wrote:

Definitely not my cup of tea and I don’t see how it relates to “romance”. Sounds more appropriate to the mystery/thriller forum.

Just my opinion.

To each his/her own…

Chancery Stone (who, incidentally, is the author of these so-called Danny Books) responded with:

Hi, Dog Lover, Danny is very definitely a ‘romance’, if you judge a romance as a story revolving around a central love relationship, regardless of gender. As the whole book (and there’s a lot of it) is about the boys’ relationship, and given that it’s specifically about the extreme intensity of it, which includes sex, I seriously fail to see how it could fail to be included, other than because societal rules say so. The fact that the book also contains other themes is neither here nor there – like I say, it’s a very big book.

He seems to have totally missed the point. The issue isn’t about gender. The issue is him trying to classify incest stories as romance.

Secondly, I am intrigued by your assertion that romances have to have HEA as a “requirement”. I’m guessing this means happy ever after? You do realise that Wuthering Heights (a book to which Danny is regularly compared) has no HEA? In fact, the whole point of Wuthering Heights is that the central lovers are doomed in their romance. I know Emily Bronte was an original and most authors do not find that bleakness palatable, but are you seriously suggesting a) that WH cannot qualify as a romance due to its reality? and that b) every other doomed romance in fiction is not a romance either?

Perhaps you are mistaking your own taste for fact.

Patronising arsehole.

He doesn’t realise that a HEA is a romance staple?

Stone continues:

Lastly, what makes you think my book “implies in any way that incestuous relationships are anything other than perversion”? And I do like your somewhat judgemental “regardless of its cause” and the idea that incest must be “dealt with to bring the character to a successful life”. You do definitely like everything tidy and ‘normal’, don’t you?

Unfortunately real life is not like that, and whereas I can already hear you arguing a case for romances being about fantasy and not real life, it doesn’t alter the fact that some authors write love stories based in reality rather than fantasy, and this does not qualify them as un-romances, just as books you don’t like.

Urrggghh – *headdesk*

Another reader, Rhian had this to say:

Are you deliberately trying to incense the people you want to buy your book? I have no objection to your original post promoting the novel but these last posts are both patronising and unnecessary.

Romance is generally read as escapism: I have no objections to thinking about societies’ norms and taboos I just don’t turn to the Romance genre for the catalyst.

And this was Stone’s response:

I’m trying to “incense” no-one. Are you incensed? If so, why, as you were not the author of any of the above comments?

I also fail to see how asserting that happy endings and fantasy are not prerequisites of romance is patronising or unnecessary. Unless by “uneccessary” you mean to suggest your opinions are valid and mine are not? And just because you don’t “turn to the romance genre” to read about society’s taboos doesn’t mean that I am not allowed to use the genre, or any other genre, to write about them.

He simply doesn’t get it. Incest may come under the erotica banner, (and even that’s a bit shady for me), but romance it aint. He’s obviously not down with any real romance authors, or he’d know that he was mostly talking out of his arse.

These next few comments had me rolling my eyes heavenwards:

Hi DL, “the expected requirements of the “romance” genre in fiction” is a very subjective issue, and it changes from month to month, fashion to fashion, author to author. You might not see it as the same thing as me, but that doesn’t make your assumptions correct, just person specific. Even several people specific, or general consensus specific doesn’t exclude me from putting myself in its radar.

I would think you’re treading a *very* thin line excluding Jane Eyre from the romance category since it is almost certainly the protoype upon which all modern romances are based. Its inclusion in your argument does make me wonder just how deoderised you expect romances to be.

As to your idea that I should publish a book featuring a child/parent abuse scenario as a romance I already have – it’s called Danny. That’s the point. The whole idea of featuring such a story in the setting of a romance is to highlight the problems of the ‘romantic ideal’ and to show that the eroticism of the classic alpha male and his pursuit of the love object can come from very infected sources indeed. This would be the subverting the genre part. But in order to subvert it, I have to be in it, and I *am* in it. Like it or no.

Urrrgggh.

I never want the genre to be sooo inclusive that it starts letting people like this man classify his work as romance. I guess that’s a pretty small-minded view, but there are times when political correctness needs to take a long trip to hell.

Thanks to Vanessa Jaye for the heads up.