L’Yan’s continuing obsession with bad blurbs

October 25th, 2009

I love terrible blurbs. Although they are often unhelpful when I am trying to categorise a book, they at least give me a good laugh.

How’s this for a phenomenally terrible blurb:

Shirley is a prostitute. She thinks she knows all her customers: the first-timers, the talkers, the lookers, the hard guys, even the occasional psychopath. But, Mr Fox is no ordinary customer: who ever heard of a punter who quoted T.S. Eliot or arranged meetings at the Tate? With their every encounter she becomes more and more confused. Is it just a scripted pick-up? Or perhaps some bizarre kind of God-game? Love-Act toys with the reader’s curiosity right to the very end. It could be a book about seduction and manipulation or truth and invention or desire and the end of desire. Or not. It is for the reader to discover where the conundrums of M.E. Austen’s taunting game can lead in a first novel of rare and compelling ingenuity.

Blurb from M. E. Austen’s Love Act, Black Swan, 1982

An entirely unhelpful blurb of “rare and compelling” stupidity. I love it.


One Response to “L’Yan’s continuing obsession with bad blurbs”

  1. Sandra on October 26, 2009 12:07 pm

    I love bad blurbs too. I laughed at this one. YOu should read some of the blurbs on Penny Vincenzi books. Their more entertaining than the actual books most of the time. Some could also go in the crap covers section. Thanks for the laugh.

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