50 shades book review

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No Pain, No Gain

By Anthony Lane

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in Sam TaylorJohnsons adaptation of the novel.

If the figures are correct, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James, has been bought by more than a hundred million people, of whom only twenty million were under the impression that it was a paint catalogue. That leaves a solid eighty million or so who, upon reading sentences such as “He strokes his chin thoughtfully with his long, skilled fingers,” had to lie down for a while and let the creamy waves of ecstasy subside. Now, after an enticing buildup, which took to extreme lengths the art of the peekaboo, the film of the book is here.

Nothing has exercised the novel’s devotees—the Jamesians, as we must think of them—quite as much as the proper occupants of the central roles. Who could conceivably play Christian Grey, the awkward young billionaire with the extensive neckwear collection, let alone Anastasia Steele, the English-lit major who is also, as we gasp to learn, one of the leading virgins of Vancouver, Washington? Many combinations were suggested, my own preference being Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, who made such a lovely couple in “The Prince of Tides,” but in the end the lucky winners were Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson. Good choices, I reckon, especially Johnson, who, as the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, knows everything about predators who stare and swoop.

Ana, as she is usually called, first meets Christian Grey at Grey House, which is home to Grey Enterprises, in Seattle. (Don’t you adore rich men who hide themselves away?) She is there in lieu of her roommate, who was meant to interview Grey for the college newspaper but has fallen sick. Ana, ushered into his presence, stumbles first over the threshold and then over her words, but begins to melt as he expounds on his bountiful gifts. “I’ve always been good at people,” he says, as though people were Scrabble or squash. He is interested in “what motivates them—what incentivizes them.” Any woman should run a mile from a man who uses the verb “incentivize,” but things could have been worse, I guess. He could have said “monetize.” He also lends her a pencil, bearing the word “Grey,” the tip of which she rubs against her lip. Either she has a cold sore or these folks are getting ready to rumble.

Their next encounter comes at a hardware store, where Christian is stocking up on masking tape, cable ties, and rope. “You’re the complete serial killer,” Ana says. Now, there’s a thought. We know Ana reads Jane Austen, and here, for a second, she sounds like the heroine of “Northanger Abbey,” who is mocked for always assuming the worst, or, at any rate, the most gothically arousing. Also, Dornan is no stranger to wickedness; in “The Fall,” a BBC drama that shows on Netflix, he is a serial killer, armed with a rasping beard, his native Belfast accent, and roughly ten times the sexual allure that he projects in “Fifty Shades.” Could Ana’s fears be well founded? Is Christian a terminator? No. He is many things—a pianist, a pilot, a pervert, and a tremendous bore—but evil is not in his wardrobe. Ana asks casually if he is a “do-it-yourselfer.” That would explain a lot.

Christian, it transpires, has a private passion, the cause of what James calls “his odd I’ve-got-a-whopping-big-secret smile.” Down a corridor of his apartment, behind a locked door, lurks his Red Room. Lavishly stuffed with the tools of domestic torture, it is supposed to radiate a breathless lust, although the result looks more like a spread from House Beautiful . Here, within these crimson walls, our hero is free to express himself as a “dominant,” meaning not that he is the fifth tone of the diatonic scale, which really would be hot, but, rather, that he constrains and chastises women who wish to be treated thus. At least, that’s what he tells himself. Mostly, he sounds like your basic stalker: “I’m incapable of leaving you alone,” he informs Ana—a notion that appears to stimulate her, although it would easily warrant a call to 911. She succumbs, up to a point, but her recurring doubts lead Christian to dish up one of those crusty old no-means-yes propositions which feminism has battled for decades: “You want to leave? Your body tells me something different.” Pass the butt plug.

So how does the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, stack up against the book? And what’s in it for non-Jamesians? Well, we lose Ana’s introduction to fellatio, set precariously in a bathtub; in a similar vein, we skip the breakfast that she shares with Christian at an International House of Pancakes. Above all, we are denied James’s personifications, which are so much livelier than her characters: “My sleepy subconscious has a final swipe at me.” “ yes ! My inner goddess is thrilled.” “ no ! my psyche screams.” Couldn’t someone have got Sarah Silverman to play the psyche?

On the other hand, the film, by dint of its simple competence—being largely well acted, not too long, and sombrely photographed, by Seamus McGarvey—has to be better than the novel. It could hardly be worse. No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. There are poignant moments when the plainest of physical actions is left dangling beyond the reach of her prose: “I slice another piece of venison, holding it against my mouth.” The global appeal of the novel has led some fans to hallow it as a classic, but, with all due respect, it is not to be confused with “Madame Bovary.” Rather, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the kind of book that Madame Bovary would read. Yet we should not begrudge E. L. James her triumph, for she has, in her lumbering fashion, tapped into a truth that often eludes more elegant writers—that eternal disappointment, deep in the human heart, at the failure of our loved ones to acquire their own helipad.

Much of the novel’s fixation with style, or with the barrage of stuff that a sense of style can buy, is carried onto the screen. Where the money shots should be, we get shots of what money can provide. The subtle silk ties that adorned the paperback covers, and which somehow made it O.K., by a dazzling sleight of the publisher’s hand, to read soft pornography in public, are arrayed in the opening scene. Ana can barely move for Audis. Christian wows her with rides, first in his thunderous chopper and then in his smooth white glider, presumably praying that she won’t have seen Pierce Brosnan do the same in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” The only viewer, in fact, who may feel shortchanged by “Fifty Shades of Grey” is Liam Helmer, who is listed in the credits as “BDSM Technical Consultant.” Check out the Red Room: rack upon rack of cutting-edge bullwhips, a variety of high-end ass paddles, and more restraining cuffs than you can shake a stick at. And how much of this kit gets used? A mere fraction, and even then Christian, supposedly the maestro of pain, can do little more than brush his cat-o’-nine-tails over Ana’s flesh with a feathery backhand. He looks like Roger Federer, practicing gentle cross-court lobs at the net.

And there you have the problem with this film. It is gray with good taste—shade upon shade of muted naughtiness, daubed within the limits of the R rating. Think of it as the “Downton Abbey” of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination. You get dirtier talk in most action movies, and more genitalia in a TED talk on Renaissance sculpture. True, Dakota Johnson does her best, and her semi-stifled giggles suggest that, unlike James, she can see the funny side of all this nonsense. When Christian, alarmed by Ana’s maidenhood, considers “rectifying the situation,” she replies, “I’m a situation?”—a sharp rejoinder, although if I were her I’d be much more worried about the rectifying. Even Johnson’s valiant performance, however, cannot pierce the gloom, or persuade her co-star to lighten up. He brings color to her cheeks, courtesy of mild slaps, but she brings no light to his spirit in return. He spends half the time badgering her about a contract that has been drawn up, in which she—“the Submissive”—must consent to his supremacy. Clauses and subsections are haggled over in such detail that one feels bound to ask: How much of a sex film can this be, given that the people most likely to be turned on by it are lawyers?

“Fifty Shades of Grey” is being released in time for Valentine’s Day. That’s a bold move, since the film is not just unromantic but specifically anti-romantic; take your valentine along, by all means, but, be warned, it’ll be like watching “Rosemary’s Baby” at Christmas. Try holding hands as the hero taunts the rituals of sentiment, such as going out for dinner and a movie: “That’s not really my thing.” What his thing actually is, Lord knows, although, to judge by the importance that he attaches to grooming, regular feeding, and nicely buffed leather goods, my suspicion is that he doesn’t want a girlfriend at all. I know Mr. Grey’s whopping-big secret. He wants a pony. ♦

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E.L. James’s Fifty Shades series has come to an end. What have we learned from this provocative romance?

The sixth and final installment of the E.L. James series Fifty Shades, “ Freed ,” released June 1, is selling briskly, as one might expect. Its chart-busting progenitor, “ Fifty Shades of Grey ,” published in 2011, sold 15.2 million copies by 2020 , making it the best-selling book of the last decade. Despite its widely agreed on lack of literary merit, “Fifty Shades of Grey” bristled with tension and packed major shock value, as soft-core sadomasochistic porn entered the mainstream of women’s fiction.

As copies of “Fifty Shades” were seen on the sidelines at the soccer game, the city pool and the PTA meeting, a flood of media coverage was churned out in an attempt to figure out why women would embrace such a thing. But embrace they did. An international army of devoted fans has followed the series to its end and propelled film versions to equal popular success and critical disdain.

The first three books were narrated by Anastasia Steele, a 21-year-old Washington State University student who met 27-year-old Seattle billionaire Christian Grey while on assignment for her college newspaper. They became involved in a sexual relationship with elements of bondage, dominance and sadomasochism (BDSM) that in the third book evolved into marriage and a baby. Rather than try to keep the wild bedroom dynamic alive amid breast pumps and diapers, James ended things there — then started over, with a second set of three novels telling the same story from Christian’s point of view.

So, this really is the end — unless James plans to retell it once again, from the point of view of the housekeeper, the bodyguard — or the riding crop.

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“Freed” is a long goodbye indeed, a 768-page retelling of what unfolded in “ Fifty Shades Freed ” in a mere 592. It deploys the familiar narrative shticks of the series so mechanically that it almost seems possible that James gave up and let a computer write the book for her. Italicized inner monologue; horrific dream sequences; exchanges of bantering emails; detailed sex scene. Repeat. “Freed” lacks both narrative tension and any element of surprise, not only because the plot is already known and the couple has already had every kind of kinky sex, but also because the pacing is so leisurely and the plot development so lugubrious. All the significant action — kidnapping, gunplay, labor and delivery — is compressed into the last 200 pages.

Nonetheless, there is something interesting about it. As strangely packaged as it may be, at the core of “Freed” is an unexpected feminist message.

If it is fantasy fulfillment to be loved by a rich, handsome, powerful man as passionately as Christian loves Ana, to have a lover worship your body the way he worships hers (and also to have a body as beautiful as hers), it is nobody’s fantasy to be married to a jealous, controlling textbook-case obsessive. Christian is one sick ticket. Through his narration, we get a very deep dive into the kind of mind that equates loving a woman with the terror of losing her, resulting in the need to control her every move for her so-called safety.

Christian’s psyche is so fragile that every shadow that crosses Ana’s face creates the panic that she doesn’t love him anymore. Even seeing another man say hello to Ana in an elevator causes him to plummet into a territorial freakout: “Back off, bud.” Christian is the kind of guy whose wife ends up in a battered woman’s center. Instead, James has him channel his anger and violent urges into what he calls punishment sex. And fortunately, Ana enjoys these interludes — or at least up to a point. One of Christian’s darkest hours comes when she uses the safe word they have agreed on to end one particular “game” he’s started.

Almost all the conflict in the book is generated by Ana’s resistance to Christian’s attempts to control her. When she informs him that she will not include the word “obey” in her marriage vows, that she will not quit her job after they are married, that she prefers not to change her name — he goes into a complete emotional tailspin. “I want her happy and I want to protect her. But how can I do that if she’s not willing to obey me?”

Instead, Ana openly defies him. Christian is at a charity event in New York when his security people inform him that back in Seattle, Ana has disobeyed his instructions to stay home and has gone out drinking with a girlfriend. He goes to the airport and flies home immediately. But his attempt to lay down the law meets equal rage on her part. When it turns out there actually was a reason for his request that she confine herself to the apartment, she’s even angrier, because by withholding this information, he’s treated her like a child. Cue the furious emails-inner monologue-terrible nightmare-off to the bedroom.

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In addition to a healthy refusal to be controlled, James gives Ana considerable machismo. She can drive his Audi R8 Spyder luxury sports car as fast and furiously as Christian can and asks if she can have her own for her birthday. She holds her own in a bar fight, decking a guy who is annoying her before Christian has time to react. And it is Ana who finally guns down Jack Hyde, an office predator who has been after the couple since Christian fired him from his job the previous novel and now has graduated to sabotaging planes, setting bombs and kidnapping family members. (He is Hyde to Christian’s Jekyll because he has the same troubled background but instead of turning out to be a successful, gorgeous Dom that women love, he became an evil creep who exploits women with sex tapes and is determined to destroy Christian and his family.)

In the end, “Freed” hammers home the point that while women may enjoy submission in the bedroom they do not enjoy being controlled and oppressed outside it. The thought of being married to someone like Christian — even with the private planes, the home in Aspen, the servants, the cars, the yacht, the constant pouring of pink champagne — is terrifying. But Ana breaks him. Not only does she refuse to end her pregnancy so he will not have to compete with a child for her love — her finest hour, as far as rebellion goes — by the end of the book, she has the gurgling baby sleeping in their bed.

And on that wholesome note, all fifty shades fade to black.

Marion Winik a professor at the University of Baltimore, is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love,” “The Lunch-Box Chronicles” and, most recently, “The Big Book of the Dead.”

Freed: Fifty Shades Freed as Told by Christian

By E L James

Bloom Books. 768 pp. Paperback, $18.99

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50 Shades of Grey – Book Review

Never one to resist the hype of a good read, or rather the claim of “Mommy Porn,” I downloaded EL James’ 50 Shades of Grey, anticipating an entertaining page-turner, a modern-day love affair (I pictured my grandma’s collection of old romance novels, taking place in the now, equipped with texting and instant messages). Having no further background than the porno reference, I was stunned – shocked – at what waited in the pages before me. Not because of the explicit sex scenes, but rather the terribly underdeveloped protagonist, the unrealistic storyline – and above all else, the bitterly disappointing message this novel sends to all women about the value of love within a relationship.

Please stop meow if you don’t want anything about the plot revealed.

Ana wakes up the next morning in his hotel room – fully clothed – and he asks to see her again under better circumstances. The tension is building. In the following pages, we see a relationship develop, as the wealthy Christian showers her with gifts, such as a laptop and an Audi, as well as his signature lack of emotional availability. Eventually, amid warnings about his own dark secrets, Christian Grey tells Ana who he really is – a sexual deviant who likes to dominate his women into submission – literally. He wants Ana to be his sexual slave, locked under his thumb, required to sign a contract (unenforceable by law), that locks her into a set of rules. The breaking of said rules, according to the contract, is punishable by time in his “Playroom” or mini torture chamber – nothing life threatening, though. Along with this reveal, he asks her to sign an NDA, no doubt to preserve his professional reputation.

And then it’s time for Ana’s big reveal. She is a virgin.

The plot thickens.

Let us now pause to assess the situation: First of all, Ana manages to graduate college without ever being drunk, ever having sex, and without owning a laptop. The last point is what concerns me the most. When Christian buys her a top of the line MacBook, she refers to it as the “mean machine.” Are you kidding me? We have a girl – a virgin – tampering with a guy who wants to get his rocks off by beating the crap out of her – and she is okay with this – but then she refers to a laptop as a mean machine and to Christian as a multi-bagillionaire. Who is this idiot?

The contract has a list of rules that Ana will be required to follow. She must workout, eat regularly, maintain her health and hygiene, wear the clothing he provides, obey his every request, and spend every weekend with him for a period of three months. She also is forbidden to touch Christian or make eye contact with him. The contract is negotiable, so she opts to change the mandated number of workouts from four-times per week to three. This is completely logical, I mean what normal girls wants to touch or make eye contact with her lover anyway?

While the contract is still a matter of discussion, Christian and Anastasia consummate their relationship. Surprise! She has five orgasms the first time. And then dons her hair in pigtails and dances around his kitchen, Risky Business style, while preparing him breakfast. Of course it didn’t make a difference that he had punished her with a spanking. Spoiler alert! Virgins dig that stuff.

In the last 25% of the book, the relationship between the two grows stronger, but more confusing. Ana becomes a bit more believable as James gets her stride in character development and it turns out the Christian has a bit of a soul (gasp!). The most charming and realistic banter between the characters takes place during playful email exchanges, however, the actual dialogue between characters is unrealistic, with the regular use of the words “ill,” “pleased,” and “shall.” For a modern-day romance, the language is flawed and more advanced readers will become impatient with the constant reuse of adjectives and the periodic use of thesaurus synonyms that stick out like a sore thumb. I mean, I would tell my boyfriend that he beguiled me if he asked if he could whip me with a riding crop, too.

The larger issue that this novel presents is that women should never be comfortable offering their bodies to a man that makes it clear he is emotionally incapable of love and perfectly willing to implement capital punishment for eye rolling. Grey is a quintessential predator, Ana his prey, and the plot insinuates that, for the sake of eroticism, this is acceptable. Only at the very end does Ana come to terms with her fate. The final four pages do convince readers to continue with the next book in the trilogy. Mission accomplished, James! However, if they continue remotely in the same fashion as the first, they will leave much to be desired – beyond, of course, a story laced with Mommy Porn.

50 Shades of Grey supposedly started off as fan fiction, based on the Twilight series. While James had every opportunity to create a stronger, more emotionally developed protagonist, she created a world to which the boundaries of sexual delinquency, love, and relationships are blurred beyond distinction. While Twilight is flawed in its writing style, at least the story line paints a picture of loving and committed relationships – something that is completely butchered in 50 Shades of Grey. Being the curious little bird that I am, I will keep reading and will drink again to a wicked storyline that had me flushing crimson on the subway – fingers crossed it isn’t a disappointment, but at least I know what to expect.

144 responses to “50 Shades of Grey – Book Review”

No laptop and email account in year 2011??? I find it hard to believe.

Having read this insight on 50 shades of grey, I must agree. The author seems to favor the use of “Inner goddess” And there is no story line or plot behind it. The way I see it in simple terms is that Anastasia, is a young naive girl who fell for millionaire, and surprise surprise when he casually tells her he enjoys tying girls up and enforcing pain upon them. Not only is this somewhat sick (No offense to any submissive/dominant people out there.) but I find it humiliating to females all over, especially how Mr. Grey has a somewhat Bi Polar personality. I find it annoying how he changes from “Casual and humorous.” to “Horny and sadistic” within seconds. As far as I can tell his character is unstable and I found it a waste of my time. Also, Anastasia’s naive, idiotic willingness for such treatment I find is a disgrace to women everywhere, and I can’t help but think that personally, If some STRANGER told me he wanted to control me sexually and inflict pain on me, I would call the cops if I didn’t strangle him first.

The only good critisism I can offer is that it was unique, and despite it’s horrible plot managed to keep me interested for the first thousand pages or so.

Agreed on there being “much better erotica” out there… and FREE mind you!

that was awesome and so true., i have a sister and a friend who keeps on pushing me to read the books, they even bought the trilogy just to make me read because i told them that i won’t waste my time to read it through the pdf file they have., i started reading, i admit that the start caught me but the latter parts were just too much., damn that blackberry whatsoever, everything just don’t make sense, how could she have made three books of disappointment., it’s so ridiculous how people are fawning over it., not that it’s my business but it’s still a waste of time and a wreck in real novels, and how could they even consider making a movie out of it? and to think that every time my sister would compare men she sees to christian grey is just too annoying., like “christian would have this and that and so on and so forth~” it’s just too much., and the point about his awesome riches is just true, it’s damn unrealistic to make a character that rich! he could be rich, yes. but as rich as christian grey is too absurd.,

just to make it short, I HATE THAT TRILOGY AND IT’S NOT WORTH TO BUY a 15.95 DOLLAR PER BOOK WITH PAGES THAT ARE JUST FILLED WITH KINKY FUCKERY!

I believe this book underwent an editorial process..if the author uses a narrow collection of vocabulary, the editor should have seen that..let’s blame him/her..

hahaha I love your comment…i have not read the book, but I sure won’t know that i had read all the reviews. Damn people sure as hell need to get educated and learn about true authors!!!!

Relax people – it’s fiction and a bit of escapism – get a grip everyone…cannot believe people get so work up over a fictional piece of writing

sounds like a real piece of crap book that stupid people buy up like gold. i guess it’s in nowadays to make garbage, create a buzz, and get super rich with no talent.

Awesome!!! Perfectly stated and I100% agree. This “new” crop or generation of people are stupid as a block of wood and love the worst garbage made these days so what happens? of course, it just inspires people to make more bad shit. we’re in a downward trend in society and don’t see any improvements unless we cut down the number of retarded people.

I love the books, I so love the story, It feels sooo good to be in love. I had fun reading the books, gave me a happy feeling. So people, just quit thinking, take the story as it is, it’s a feel good read. I hate it that the story had to finish, I hope the author continues the story of Christian and Ana. I;m just as excited to find out. And just so you know, i read them 3 times already and i want to read them still, because I can!

I so agree with you, jeez…. and for cheshiretrap: bet you’ve never been in love, try it, it’s good, it’s heaven…

Well, i love this trilogy with all my heart. My own opinion. i so much love this book! 😉

sour graping? Heart broken? C’mon guys, think less and feel more, life’s not that bad…….just a feel good read, be in love, it’s good, it’s healthy, won’t give you a coronary…..

Would everybody hate this book if the main characters were aliens? I’m thinking in terms of two, E.T.-esque aliens tumultuously entangled in a violent love affair. …Most likely the answer is no. Having aliens as main characters would ensure this unimaginable story line stay in the fictional realm. Get a grip people. You hate this book so much, but why? When have you all met people like Ana and Christian in real life that would make you raise concerns about this book’s affects on young women? Are we not allowed to define fictions in our own terms, such as E.L. James did? And to a previous comment, people who read this book for entertainment purposes actually DO have their own love life and get “shagged” on a regular basis. I’m glad, as a 27 year old female in a wonderful relationship, I still know the most elementary definitions of real and fake. Open your minds and shut your mouths.

Thank you, thank you for this review. I thought I was the only woman in the world who found this really stupid book completely juvenile and so off-the-mark with this obviously 14 year old heroine and pedophile protagonist. After reading about a third of the book I could only see her dressed in a cheerleader outfit with an outsized lollipop near her mouth. While my friends, my sisters, were drooling, I was repulsed. And that was before there was any sex at all!

Wow! this is the fourth negative comment I read and its stops HERE!! For the most part this book is FICTION!!!!! All of these negative replies are obviously coming from either old dried up women who never get sex, or from jealous women you have never been made love to like a women should ,be made love to. Lastly and the most obvious from men who only make love the “Vanilla” way and think thats enough for his partner. I had a partner for 10 years who made love to me the way a man should…..like Cristian!! So get off your high horses people and cut it out with your negative and repetitive replys, I’m sorry you have boring sex lives and feel a need to vent your frustrations on E. L. Woods 50 Shades websites, I think young men and women reading these books will actually learn and grow to making better love with each other buy learning what I call the sensual Christian moves, to learn to give an take in a relationship, hence creating better lives for familys and friends!! About the s and m and bondage in this book frankly it turned me on but personally my choice is not to engage in it. Remember we alll have a CHOICE and its our own decision in life to what we want!!

so let me just say this much everyone is entitled to their own opinion you dont think the book is a good read then write your own. you think that is was not properly developed and whatever else have you then prove you can do it better since you have so much to say. as a 21 year old as much as i may not know about book writing i think it was a damn good read something to excite you and even give ideas as to spicing up ur sex life. so much bull i see written here like seriously

Not liking this book does not mean women are either jealous or ‘dried up’. Any one with a good sex life are the ones that dislike this book. It’s a false portrayal of BDSM. The writing is appalling. Avid readers are usually spot on about this pile of crap book. Most of the glowing reviews are from people who start their review with, “I really don’t read but……” “I’m not a reader….” That should give us a clue. How reliable are those that never pick up a book? They have nothing to compare it to and wouldn’t know a good book if it slapped them in the face.Wait until they get a hold of some real erotic fiction….or a good story in general.

The Hunger Games is brilliant. You have NO idea what you are talking about. THG is way better than either Twilight or 50 Shades.

I’m almost at end of book 2 and love it. Doesn;t mean I’d like to be treated as such but hey, it’s called using your imagination.

OMG my thoughts exactly!!! I read the first book and halfway through the second one hoping it would get better at some point, but I found myself hating Anastasia and all her inner voices sooo much I just couldn’t go on. It’s like she’s retarded or something. It’s definitely one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I’m worried about the fact that this kind of crap got published in the first place, and even moreso that it got so popular. The only explanation I can find is that those people who liked it had never read a book in their lives before.

More than your comments about this crappy book (and it is crappy) I like Lucy342, are more disturbed by your comment “by no means consider yourself a feminist”. Wow, with the War on Women raging around the world, you should be PROUD to call yourself a Feminist…it’s not a bad word you know…no matter how many men tell you it is. Just had to put in my 2 cents, it’s so disturbing to find women who disrespect their own gender. Wanting equality is NOT a bad thing, Ashley.

sadly, it’s seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. I live in Spain and EVERYONE’S read the book/s, everywhere else in Europe too. lot’s of my friends have read it as well and while all agree that it’s badly written, most of them have enjoyed it. I just can’t understand why. I’m now on a mission of recommending them other books with erotic twists so they can get a taste of something not-so-crappy. and I’m serious about it. it just makes me so angry that someone would make all this money off a job so badly done.

hahahaha me too!

I totally agree that ‘The Hunger Games’ is way far better than 50 shades.. ( can’t comment on Twilight,never read..just watched the films)

I believe this book should be stopped. This is dangerous. The reading material is not suitable for everyone. The content itself is harmful, dirty and disgusting. The author should be subconscious. I mean if you want to make a book best seller do it on a right thing, on a good story not like this. What’s wrong with these people going crazy about this book and the author also! Doing BDSM is so pathetic. How low life they have to do this. BDSM is not LOVE or ROMANCE that we all desire to have. Its like an act of violence! In short its so YUCKY!!! And I think there is something wrong with them psychologically if you’re in BDSM!

Kill this book. Of course if you’re parent this book is dangerous and no parents would want to date Christian Grey because he is psychologically unfit!

and he doesn’t deserve your daughter!

and would you like your daughter to got hurt by Christian Grey? Stupid! Christian Grey should be excommunicated.

What I don’t understand is why did this book sell so many copies, when my book “Real Solutions to Children’s Health” has barely sold any copies. I would love to believe that humanity is more intelligent than what I am hearing. Why are books and movies like this so highly valued in our society? There is so much good in this world; why are people so attracted to the crap?

Forced myself through 1st book. Have a FB page dedicated to 50 Shades haters. Yes, it’s the dumbing down of the Western World.

so, after listening to the younger women at work go on and on about how good these books are….. I borrowed them…….hoping for something more steamy than a Harlequin… was disgusted about three chapters in….this is sick stuff………the author should be ashamed of herself… and the people who actually enjoy them need help….

On FEB– Valentine’s Day Special movie don’t miss the performance of Dakota johnson of 50 Shades of Grey 2015 Movie

Alright. So while reading some comments (that were actually very entertaining) I felt the need to join the hundreds and thousands of people who voiced their constructive opinion. I will not say anything that wasn’t already said, but I really have to express my feelings about it.

I don’t like bashing people who accomplished something (I will call it “accomplishment”, but only because it was sort of finished and published… More than I can say about myself), so I will try to be as honest and constructive in my criticism as I can.

I read books in my life. Some I loved, some I didn’t, some were just boring . However, I never felt embarrassed reading a book… Until now.

I heard so much about the book. Even read a news article which stated that FSoG was one of the most popular books in some prison. And now I hear they are making a movie. Plus, the fact that there is BDSM in it. I’ve always liked stuff like that. Can’t say I had too much real life experience, but kink always made things more fun. We don’t have a lot of books about it that went mainstream like that. So how could I pass on it?

I honestly had to fight through every page I read. Never struggled so much with reading. The first thing I noticed was the “style” it had… If I can call it that. I felt like my IQ was dropping with every sentence. It really feels like it was written by a child. For some reason the author is compelled to repeat herself on each page: the lip biting, the blushing, etc. The “inner goddess” was plain stupid. I wanted to choke myself each time this “goddess” danced salsa or drooled over the guy. When they make the movie, will there be a special person who plays her “inner goddess” and if they do, I sincerely hope they change it to an “inner god” and let Morgan Freeman play the part. Seriously now, These Goddess and Subconscious were mentioned so much, one has to wonder if the girl actually hearing voices.

And why in the name of all that is holy we need to be constantly reminded all the time that the guy is hot. We get it, he is hot, he is super hot, he is hotter than the hottest day in hell, just don’t say it every time you mention him.

Now, the characters. Well, I think I’ve seen much more complex and believable characters in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. You know, the one where the cat chases the mouse. Main characters in this book came straight out of a fairytale. They are totally unreal and cardboard. The girl is 21 years old, yet she never had sex nor had a boyfriend. Can I believe it? Sure. But the fact that she never masturbated or never owned a computer… It would make sense if she was Amish, but I don’t remember it was mentioned in the book. Really, hard to believe that she never even felt the desire to have sex, yet gave a perfect blowjob on her first go. In general, she is boring and stupid, clumsy, ohhh and sooo annoying! The way she blushes every time he looks at her, the way she keeps on almost fainting after every word he says to her. Another thing is her insecurity. She constantly tells herself how she can’t be liked by a man like Grey, though there’s a lineup of guys who would have given anything to be with her. There is a reason women like men who are self-sufficient and confident. I would say this goes for women too. A girl who always thinks she is ugly, isn’t too sexy or attractive. I personally would have lost interest in her after 5 minutes, even if she is a supermodel.

Now, Christian. Imagine the most perfect man alive… And multiply it by 10. That’s Grey. He seems so perfect that the gods of Olympus cry in envy and Prince Charming nervously smoking in the far corner. I mean, he is handsome as a god, muscular like he was photoshoped, he can fly a chopper, he plays piano better then Mozart and he is rich… I mean BILLIONAIRE rich! And all that… Wait for it… At the age of 26! Ok, now let’s break it down. Can a person fly an aircraft at 26? Yes. Can he play so well? Of course, if he started around 10 years old or something. But a freaking billionaire? Seriously? You can be. If you invented Google, or Facebook… Or I don’t know, a time machine. But that’s not the case. I don’t think even Christian himself knows what he is doing in his office.

I get why the author wanted to make him THAT rich. He supposed to be this prince of the universe type, and well, millionaire just isn’t rich enough. However, if you insist on that, at least make him like 40-45 years old. Men can still look attractive at that age, no? Overall the character really gives an impression of a huge arrogant asshole, the way he treats people around him. I guess that was the idea, but it sure doesn’t add to his sympathy score. Just in comparison to give few examples of likable arrogant assholes: Hank Moody and Dr. House. Christian Grey, however, comes across simply as a real douche, begging for a bitchslap.

The whole dominance was also very unbelievable. If you are this strict and controlling alpha male, just stick to it. Grey, on the other hand, is all over the place. He tries to be dominant, yet he is very caring and protective at the same time. As a result, I couldn’t stop facepalming myself every time he was showing his dominance. Felt like he was just trying too hard, and still not very successful.

When Ana tried to kiss him for the first time, he said something like “I’m not the one you need” or “I’m too dangerous for you”… Captain mysterious! Of course, she felt rejected and depressed, so she had to cry herself to sleep for the next few days. However, just when she began to feel better, he reminds her of himself by sending a very expensive gift. Seriously dude? You just turned her down, told her to forget you and yet you keep coming back? My logic really took a beating right there. The guy in this story acts like a teenage girl.

Can’t say much about the sex – I could not force myself read past one of the first sex scenes. Still I wasn’t impressed with the bits I have read. Like I noted before, Ana’s change from a don’t-touch-me-I’m-a-virgin to a sex pro was so rapid that it blew my mind… and not in a good way.

Someone said in the comments that we all might be subjects in a social experiment of a sort. Thinking about it, I might see the sense in that statement. Maybe this book was written for a sole purpose to test the marketing system, because it’s all there is with this book – a successful and brilliantly executed marketing. Perhaps, one day this will be included in a marketing and business school textbook as an example of how to make millions and millions of dollars out of used toilet paper.

In conclusion, I will say this. At one point I had a sudden urge to write a small anti-fanfic episode for the book, in which Gray gets a visit from a mob and gets his “pleasures” in his Red Room… only now as the little sissy that he is. Say what you will, but it was kinda funny.

hahahahaha…. OMG! your comment is so funny, I laughed a lot, thanks :’D ..and I totally agree with you, I just read like the first 100 pages on a flight, and it was enough!! I also laughed a lot reading those pages.

You think that because you are a sub-intellectual automaton.

Wow, I could not agree with you more!! I seriously have never wanted to murder characters in a book before, and this series made me constantly wish for them both (but especially her) to have a real neck I could throttle or something! And as much as I hated it from almost the start, I’m one of those people who cannot quit something halfway through, so I made myself read all 3 books. I’m just SO glad she eventually dropped the whole “Inner Goddess” and “Subconscious” bullshit, because that was driving me crazy!

I think its an over glorified MB, very disappointed.

[…] some saucy tips they can use on a partner. Who knows. But as Chris Al-Aswad points out on his blog, James “created a world to which the boundaries of sexual delinquency, love, and […]

I can’t agree with you more. Seriously. Most frustrating book ever. I can’t believe how people dig this shit.

I don’t know how I managed to finish this book. The first thing i did when i read the glorious “the end”, was to search desperately for a negative review, to restore my faith in humanity. Thank you. Now I know I am not the only one who thinks this book is an insult to literature.

Fifty was a okay book in my opinion. I think it was over hyped because books like the Crossfire Series or the Masked Emotions Series is so much better than this.

I find it funny that I’m commenting on a book and a review from nearly 10 years ago. Full disclosure – I read all of the books, and I unfortunately saw the movies. I’ve even read 50 Shades Fan Fiction (don’t bother, it’s limited and much worse than the book). As a writer and avid reader, I’m trying to understand the appeal, Yet I bought it and read it and bought into the whole 50 Shades ecosystem.

First, I give James a lot of credit for getting such poorly written crud published, for capitalizing on it, getting movie rights, and even co-branding sex toys. The phenomenon brought an interesting public discourse not as much about relationships, but about the appeal of kinky se and fantasies frowned upon by social norms. It’s common for people to fantasize about submission, or about being swept off of their feet and validated for who they are and what they can offer. He’s hot and rich, and there’s that fantasy as well – being cared for and not having to worry about paying rent.

That said, I suppose my own fascination came from the series’ poor quality, as odd as that may sound. The characters are stilted and undeveloped, though they do grow and evolve as any character should. The dialog is horrid, there’s no way to put it kinder. As an American, it irritates me to no end when someone writes of a place and a culture that they have no knowledge of. I’ve been to the UK a few times, but I wouldn’t write a book set in London unless it were about an American in London – because I don’t have enough knowledge of the quirks of language and culture that are unique to every locale.

Little things beyond the “Holy cow!” inanity really bug me, to the point of stopping my reading. As you mention, the stilted language reads like a high school essay mixed with an online thesaurus. Some things that still annoy me to this day – Grey Enterprises Holdings is an idiotic name that you’d rarely see in the US. Enterprises are holdings. Or is he a mixed business leader and hedge fund/angel investor? I get the Harvard dropout, though that’s clearly a copy of Gates, Zuckerberg, and other entrepreneurs who left Harvard. Oddly, Grey never speaks of his time in college (note not “university” – college). Few details are shared about his billions – except that his first venture was in telecom, or that he employs tens of thousands of people? Really? What do the people at Grey House (House? Not just Grey, or The Grey Building?) do if it’s a holding company? Buffet runs a much larger holding company with about 20 employees. Beyond his business, there’s referring to one’s apartment or penthouse as the building name (I’ve never heard of such a thing), having parents who throw balls nearly every weekend, and never taking advantage of a bustling city’s cultural, culinary, or outdoor offerings. For a local billionaire businessman. Right.

Then Ana. Entirely implausible as you mention – the virginity perhaps, but never fooled around, never had a boyfriend, never had a laptop? Is amazed at an online library? Economically, she graduates from college but neither of her parents have money, but she graduated debt-free, with enough money to move to Seattle. And after working her way through school, she plans to just figure things out after graduation – no idea of a job, an industry, no contacts, but within days has interviews? With no experience, no internship. Despite her school being rather close to Seattle, only 2 of her friends live there?

Then there’s the craziness of getting promoted from admin assistant to acting editor within a few weeks, moving in and getting engaged in less than a month, and then a month or so later, getting married and getting pregnant. Sure.

I love writing fiction because I can suspend belief. But I feel some obligation, even in writing fantasy, to ground my characters and their behavior in some semblance of reality. Sorry to ramble nearly a decade later. I enjoyed your review, and wish I could better understand the appeal – even the appeal to myself. The only thing I’ve come up with is that the character traits, behaviors, growth, and general story line are so horrid, I feel that the characters themselves deserve better.

I must admit that I enjoyed reading the trilogy because of the intensity I felt regarding the connection between the two characters, if I may say so. To say that the writing style is catastrophic is an exaggeration, because there are far worse things out there. But I do admit that the sentence construction is pretty well worked out. I think that if I were to read it again, what I felt the first time would no longer be the case, because some books you read correspond to a period when your mind will be receptive and guide you towards an unknown reading.

I agree with many reviews that the “literary” style is poor, because for me, it doesn’t look like it, considering this word on a much higher level. EL James is not an author with a talent for grammatical prose. It’s more like someone who’s just starting out in writing and is trying to improve it for certain paragraphs. I write and over the years you learn, you improve, you correct what you’re having trouble with. When it comes to constructing a fictional idea, you have to think about important points to make it credible and realistic. Unless it’s done on purpose, as in a parody.

The first problem with the characters is their age. To be a billionaire at only 27, in this way and which remains rather vague because it is vaguely developed, is somewhat implausible. It would have been more believable if the character had been older, just like Anastasia’s, but no doubt EL James felt this would be less appealing, less exciting for readers. Right! Let’s face it, she certainly didn’t think it through, since the changes made were apparently very slight.

The story would have been better if it had been imagined differently. Why make it about an innocent, (somewhat) naïve, virginal young woman who loses her virginity to a sado-masochistic man, so that they can then practice BDSM together? And yes! Ana’s virginity is obviously an obstacle to Christian Grey’s sexual plans. Imagine that, and it probably turns everyone on. No wonder what’s been made as a “movie” sucks, let’s face it. The novel would have had to be disturbing, really dark, uncomfortable, immersing the reader in the world of raw BDSM, in Christian’s tortured, perverse, dark mind, to bring that feeling to everything that encompasses the universe of this story. To create a boundless and profound erotic psychological thriller.

In any case, this novel was never meant to be adapted for the big screen. You can see that as soon as you read it. Nobody wanted to act in the film, so there were a lot of problems. Both actors play badly, Dakota Johnson moans at the drop of a hat, she hardly knows how to express the right emotions, her acting is inconsistent anyway. And Jamie Dornan, poor guy! I found him very convincing in The Fall, and that’s when I thought he’d finally make a good Christian Grey. Well, he didn’t.

Few actors and actresses want to play in films with explicit scenes. And especially when it’s going to be done badly. The two intrigues of the novel are whether Ana will succeed in taming, helping Christian to exorcise his demons and vices, helping him in this process, letting him know what it is to love, respect oneself and others, and whether the villain Jack Hyde will succeed in carrying out his revenge. Frankly, I don’t know what EL James was thinking when she wrote this pseudo vendetta. It’s preposterous and seems to have been added after this ridiculous idea had germinated in her head. I was even embarrassed when I read this part.

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Fifty Shades of Grey Review

A few shades short..

A Pair of Fifty Shades Sequels in the Works

I'd like to think Fifty Shades of Grey knows exactly what it is -- corny slash fic come to life -- and if that's the case it's almost admirable in its attempt at spectacle. (The two leads are also nice.) Unfortunately, Sam Taylor-Johnson's movie adaptation gets so caught up in the intrigue and melodrama that it never really finds its groove. Even the film's raw sex appeal is lacking, which just leaves a poorly plotted story and laughable dialogue. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.

More Reviews by Max Nicholson

Ign recommends.

Knights of the Old Republic Remake Is 'Alive and Well' at Saber, CEO Confirms

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FIFTY SHADES FREED

From the fifty shades trilogy series , vol. 3.

by E L James ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2012

The Fifty Shades trilogy ends with a lot of action, emotional tension and flashes of enlightenment; fans will be satisfied...

Ana and Christian get married, but continued physical and emotional threats, as well as Christian’s need for control, mitigate their bliss.

At the end of Fifty Shades Darker , Anastasia Steele agrees to marry her beloved magnate-billionaire boyfriend, Christian Grey. Fifty Shades Freed starts with their wedding and honeymoon, a fairy-tale journey through Europe that leaves Ana amazed and conflicted. Uncertain about her own ambitions and identity in the face of Grey’s staggering wealth and heady sexual pull, Ana sets out to stake a claim in the publishing world, helped and hindered by the fact that Christian has bought the company. Her continued personal and professional ambivalence is forgotten as she deals with personal tragedy; then exacerbated by a chafing desire for some individual freedom; and finally overshadowed by a continued threat that hovers over Ana and Christian from an old, malevolent enemy with connections to Grey’s past no one would expect and Christian doesn’t remember. Navigating a breathless few weeks of nonstop action and emotional turmoil, Ana makes some critical errors in judgment that will impact the couple forever, and Christian must finally confront some profound, painful truths in order to move forward to the life he never believed possible, but which rests within his grasp. James’ final segment of the hugely popular Fifty Shades trilogy continues along in the same vein as Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker —some compelling story arcs and a romantic “what-if” fairy-tale scenario. Ana comes across as more rather than less mature and poised in this book in some ways, particularly in her ability to whip up righteous anger toward Christian for being suffocating and stalker-ish—in order to keep her safe in the face of real danger—while taking little to no responsibility for breaking her own promises that compromise her safety. In general, the flow is decent, the story is well-paced and the dialogue remains better than expected, but there is a lot packed into this book, and it can be a little overwhelming and unbelievable. At times, too, Ana, rather than Christian, comes across as rigid and difficult, creating trumped up conflict. However, since the true function of this book is to assure the many Fifty Shades fans that all is well in Ana and Christian’s world, and they truly can overcome any and every possible thing, then the mission is accomplished in a satisfying way, with a healthy dose of hot sex. The short chapters at the end of the book—unmarked prologue and epilogue from Christian’s point of view—offer an intriguing peek into Christian’s psyche.

Pub Date: April 17, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-345-80350-4

Page Count: 583

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

Share your opinion of this book

IT ENDS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

Hoover’s ( November 9 , 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

More by Colleen Hoover

by Colleen Hoover

THE IDEA OF YOU

by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017

A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.

When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.

Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker , debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.

Pub Date: June 13, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

Anne Hathaway To Star in ‘The Idea of You’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Nicholas Galitzine To Co-Star in ‘The Idea of You’

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Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Grey by EL James review – Christian Grey indulges his inner psychopath

EL James has made Christian the narrator in her follow-up to the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. It’s still Anastasia’s story, but this novel is more realistic – and far creepier

I had no problem with the original Fifty Shades of Grey . I thought it was funny and perky, and I liked the fact that a woman got to write it on her kitchen table, rather than the other, less relaxing ways people make money in erotica.

In some ways, Grey, the follow-up to EL James’s bestseller, is almost the same book. It is as if every line of dialogue, every legal contract that sets out Christian Grey’s sub-dom relationship with Anastasia Steele, every email from the first volume has been cut and pasted in. We follow each scene in the same order, except this time we see it from Christian’s point of view.

This completely flips the narrative. The first book was a rather fun and fairly mild portrait of a woman’s sexual fantasy. Yet it is almost impossible to read Grey and not assume the narrator is going to end up in jail. It is most reminiscent of those thrillers that open from the point of view of the heavy-breathing murderer stalking his prey.

Instead of lighthearted and repetitive mild S&M, the “love affair” is now the twisted work of an utter psychopath. Whenever Ana leaves the room, even just for two minutes, Christian assumes she’s making out with another man. He wonders if she likes her men the way she likes her tea: black and weak. Anastasia is, he says, “one of the few women I’ve met who can sit in silence, which is great”. And where Anastasia famously bites her lip every two lines to signal arousal, Christian continually “shifts in his seat”. It’s not easy to make men’s bits sound sexy, but this phrase makes it sound as if he has worms.

One of the first things Christian does after he meets Anastasia – having slobbered all over her in the interview scene – is order a background check to find out everything about her. When she won’t tell him where she is going, he immediately accesses the darknet to pinpoint her location and goes to find her (she loves this). It’s the same story when she doesn’t answer an email right away, or dares to visit her mother. When he buys her lots of things and she tells him it makes her feel like a whore, he threatens to send her to his therapist to address her self-esteem issues. Never has the meme #notallmen been more relevant.

Oh, and all Christian thinks about is sex and food. It’s a bit like peering into the inside of your dog’s head – if your dog spent 80% of his day pouring out glasses of chilled Sancerre. (Dear Mr Grey: if you are truly so desperate for your girlfriend to eat properly, maybe don’t date a woman who wears a size four?)

The first trilogy was a fantasy. This book is far more realistic – and creepy beyond belief. I would never censor anything my daughter might want to read when she is older. But if she wants to read Grey, I’d make sure she knows that if anyone ever treats her like this, she should run like the wind. Because there is a flipside to the fantasy portrayed in these pages: we know there are men who think this way. Men who do want to write, like Christian Grey: “I won’t hit you again” on the consolatory flowers they send the day after an attack. Men who don’t have the looks and the helicopters that apparently make it OK. There is no happy ending to this story – unless there is a tremendous twist coming further down the line, and these are Grey’s prison diaries. Which would, as Anastasia might put it, just about appease my inner goddess.

Jenny T Colgan’s Resistance Is Futile is out now from Orbit.
Romance books
Fifty Shades of Grey

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Fifty Shades of Grey

2015, Romance/Drama, 2h 5m

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While creatively better endowed than its print counterpart, Fifty Shades of Grey is a less than satisfying experience on the screen. Read critic reviews

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Fifty shades of grey videos, fifty shades of grey photos.

When college senior Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) steps in for her sick roommate to interview prominent businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) for their campus paper, little does she realize the path her life will take. Christian, as enigmatic as he is rich and powerful, finds himself strangely drawn to Ana, and she to him. Though sexually inexperienced, Ana plunges headlong into an affair -- and learns that Christian's true sexual proclivities push the boundaries of pain and pleasure.

Rating: R (Language|Graphic Nudity|Sexual Dialogue|Some Unusual Behavior|Strong Sexual Content)

Genre: Romance, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson

Producer: Michael De Luca , E.L. James , Dana Brunetti

Writer: Kelly Marcel

Release Date (Theaters): Feb 13, 2015 wide

Release Date (Streaming): Jan 5, 2016

Box Office (Gross USA): $166.1M

Runtime: 2h 5m

Distributor: Focus Features

Production Co: Michael De Luca

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Cast & Crew

Dakota Johnson

Anastasia Steele

Jamie Dornan

Christian Grey

Jennifer Ehle

Eloise Mumford

Victor Rasuk

Luke Grimes

Marcia Gay Harden

Max Martini

Andrew Airlie

Callum Keith Rennie

Rachel Skarsten

Emily Fonda

Sam Taylor-Johnson

Kelly Marcel

Screenwriter

Michael De Luca

Dana Brunetti

Marcus Viscidi

Executive Producer

Danny Elfman

Original Music

Seamus McGarvey

Cinematographer

David Wasco

Production Design

Debra Neil-Fisher

Film Editing

Anne V. Coates

Lisa Gunning

Mark Bridges

Costume Design

Francine Maisler

Laurel Bergman

Art Director

Sandy Reynolds-Wasco

Set Decoration

Sandy Walker

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Critic Reviews for Fifty Shades of Grey

Audience reviews for fifty shades of grey.

I won't even get into why the novel sounds like utterly asinine stuff and concentrate why the movie is probably a lot more tame and also nothing to get excited about. Sure, there are some entertaining and amusing parts and, of course, a few sex scenes that show a lot of Johnson, but once the whips are whipped out things get really repetitive until there suddenly isn't much of an ending and the film just stops. Especially the last 15 minutes with all the crying are really boring and annoying. Avoid and watch porn instead.

With unintentionally hilarious dialogue, terrible writing, bad plot and just about everything being a disaster. Fifty Shades of Grey is nothing more than a porno with piss poor storytelling and dialogue. Though to be honest most pornos have better stories than this disaster of a flick. Best part, we're getting 2 more of these.... yay?....... please don't waste your time with this movie...

Though the depiction of a BDSM relationship as solely abusive is ridiculous, and the characters are bland cardboard cutouts, some of this I actually enjoyed. It makes fun of itself occasionally and can actually warrant a laugh. Visually this film is pretty well shot, with balanced, eye catching frames, and beautiful visuals of the Seattle landscape. The soundtrack and songs were really tonally perfect, though I didn't see the film as a love story so much as an off-balance depiction of an already degraded and misunderstood group of people.

Not as good as the book but still interesting

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“Fifty Shades of Grey” Book Review

The cover of Fifty Shades of Grey by Snowqueens Icedragon

I used to think A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin was the worst book I’d ever have the displeasure of reading. That was before I was introduced to Fifty Shades of Grey by Snowqueens Icedragon (yes, that’s really her pseudonym). This fan-fiction based on Stephanie Meyer’s laughable The Twilight Saga makes Meyer look like a modern day Tolkien, and even writers like George R. R. Martin and Tara “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” Gilesbie seem competent by comparison. As someone discussing Troll 2 once said of movies: with some bad books it seems like the writer didn’t know how to write a book; with some it’s more like they did know how to write a book but got hit very hard on the head. Fifty Shades is more like if the embodiment of pure evil in the universe didn’t know how to write a book and got hit very hard on the head.

Master of the Universe

I will begin by explaining the history of this dreadful story as I understand it. It began, of course, with the infamous mormon vampire romance series The Twilight Saga. A British fan named Erika Mitchell decided that the world desperately needed an “adult” version of the story and created a fan-fiction called Master of the Universe with the tagline “fifty shades of fucked up,” uploading it to fanfiction.net under the horrendous pseudonym “Snowqueens Icedragon.” Of course, just like Tara Gilesbie (Bloody rists 666), the way she writes her pseudonym is wrong; should it not be “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”? What’s worse than the awful name is that the whole premise of writing Master of the Universe is based on a fallacy.

The Twilight Saga “For Adults”

Master of the Universe was written with the intent to create “The Twilight Saga for adults.” As far as Snowqueens Icedragon was concerned, the reason Meyer’s books were childish wasn’t the infantile worldview, but rather that they included fantasy elements such as vampires. Icedragon’s work is still the same adolescent drivel that Meyer’s is, and it’s far worse in all areas, but it’s considered by its fans to be “adult” because it involves S&M and not vampires. If anything it’s the opposite. Having fantasy elements in a story has no bearing on whether it’s for kids or adults, and stories that market themselves as being “adult” seem always to be more childish than anything for children. Master of the Universe (or “Fifty Shades,” if you prefer) exemplifies this; it understands sex about as deeply as a fourth-grader drawing penises on the inside of his desk.

Fifty Shades is Born

Just as happened with My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie, the explicit and often perverse sexual content led fanfiction.net to take down Master of the Universe. Snowqueens Icedragon therefore created her own website where she could upload her sick fan-fiction without censorship. Eventually she renamed all the characters, Bella Swan becoming Anastasia Steele and Edward Cullen becoming Christian Grey, and published her faeces through a virtual publisher from Australia as “Fifty Shades of Grey.” This time she used the pseudonym “E. L. James,” but I don’t care. Anyone who writes a book like this deserves no better name than Snowqueens Icedragon.

In spite of the overwhelming amount of evidence to back up the fact that Fifty Shades is fan fiction, and despite Icedragon even having admitted it, many fans refuse to admit that Master of the Universe was a Twilight Saga fan-fiction at all. Instead they religiously believe it to have been based on a true story, and therefore that it is a one hundred percent realistic portrayal of BDSM. In their minds, Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey are real people and this is their story. Let me make this absolutely clear: Master of the Universe is not based on a true story; it’s based on a mormon sex fantasy based on a dream that Stephanie Meyer had.

I’m not going to hold back with this one. Snowqueens Icedragon or Erika Mitchell or E. L. James or whatever the hell you want to call her doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. Her books are dangerous. They’re dangerous because they portray blatant abuse up to and including rape, and instead of acknowledging it as such they pretend it’s all just kinks in the bedroom. Again, let me be as clear as I can be; what Fifty Shades portrays is not BDSM.

Concerning BDSM

In case you’re unaware, BDSM stands for “bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism” or something to that effect. I don’t claim to understand BDSM, but after even the small amount of research I did for this review I think I understand it better than Snowqueens Icedragon does. Here’s the thing about S&M; the “dominant” is supposed to be a sadist and the “submissive” is supposed to be a masochist. Bella isn’t a masochist; she’s just an idiot.

There are videos on YouTube that talk in more detail about the differences between real S&M and the abuse that Snowqueen’s Icedragon portrays in her books. At least one such video is by someone called The Dom, who’s dabbled in S&M. He explains that if the submissive isn’t a masochist then it’s not S&M; it’s abuse.

Fifty Shades of Grey Begins

Now that’s out of the way, let’s see what the worst piece of coproliterature ever to get published has to offer, shall we? What could be so bad that Sir Salman Rushdie would say of it, “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made ‘Twilight’ look like ‘War and Peace.’”?

“I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair—it just won’t behave, and damn Rose for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal.” Fifty Shades of Grey (Master of the Universe)

From the very beginning there’s something wrong with the prose. For one thing it’s written in the first-person present tense, which, at least for me, is an instant turn-off. Where storytelling is concerned, the present tense is a tense in which it’s notoriously hard to write well. I’ve only ever seen a handful of authors pull it off, and even then those works were usually in third-person present. Indeed, half of them only worked because the stories were about time-travel and therefore well-suited to the neutrality of third-person present. Concerning stories not involving time-travel, I’ve found few indeed that succeeded with the present tense. Ironically the rather more difficult “ first-person present tense” seems to be the favourite tense of amateurs, the very people who absolutely shouldn’t be attempting it.

The First Paragraph

But whom am I kidding? The tense is far from the only thing wrong with the prose in this thing! Even were this written in the past tense it would still be among the worst pieces of writing out there. Though you wouldn’t know it from those first few sentences, the punctuation, grammar, and spelling are all just about what you’d expect from a Twilight Saga fan-fiction.

“I have tried to brush my hair into submission but it’s not toeing the line. I must learn not to sleep with it wet. I recite this five times as a mantra whilst I try, once more, with the brush. I give up. The only thing I can do is restrain it, tightly, in a pony tail and hope that I look reasonably presentable.” Master of the Universe

And it only gets worse from here. Also, if she’s actually saying the words “I must not sleep with it wet,” then it should be in quotation marks, shouldn’t it? And I see she has the same love of commas as George R. R. Martin . To be fair, some of these mistakes were fixed in the eBook version after Icedragon made it big, but the improvement is less pronounced than one would hope:

“I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi-presentable.” Fifty Shades of Grey

I half expected her to compare her blue eyes to “limpid tears” or misspell “gothic.” It’s a small improvement over the original, but it’s still shit. We’re then introduced to Rosalie Hale. In The Twilight Saga she was another member of the quasi-incestuous vampire clan Edward belongs to. In Fifty Shades she’s Bella’s roommate for the same reason that Draco Malfoy is Harry Potter ’s ex-boyfriend in My Immortal.

Cullen/Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc.

Instead of being a vampire, Icedragon’s version of Edward Cullen is a rich psychopath, and Bella goes to interview him as a grudging favour to Rosalie. We see some of his unethical hiring practices, and then we get this line:

“The elevator whisks me at terminal velocity to the twentieth floor.” Fifty Shades of Grey

Terminal velocity? It becomes clear at this point that Icedragon doesn’t know what words mean. You might think she’s speaking figuratively, but if you know her writing you’ll know that she uses the word “figuratively” to denote when she’s speaking figuratively.

“…but he’s no literary hero, not by any stretch of the imagination. Is Cullen? My subconscious asks me, her eyebrow figuratively raised.” Master of the Universe

O, you thought I was joking? No; she actually does that. This brings us to one of the most ridiculous aspects of this train-wreck: Bella’s “subconscious” and “inner goddess.” This is a big part of why Fifty Shades is worse than Game of Thrones ; George R. R. Martin is at least able to convey character emotions in ways other than interpretive dance . Snowqueens Icedragon isn’t.

The “Subconscious” and Inner Goddess

Bella’s subconscious, as fate would have it, is another example of how Icedragon doesn’t know what words mean. Subconscious means you’re not fully aware of it. Bella’s subconscious, however, is the exact opposite of subconscious, as Bella hears her as a voice in her head and sees her as a fully-conscious person.

“Try to be cool Bella – my subconscious implores me.”

As others have said before, it’s not subconscious if you’re consciously aware of it. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Snowqueens Icedragon’s already proven that she, as they say, “ain’t speak no english no good.” Moving on, there’s the “inner goddess.”

“oh my… my inner goddess is doing a triple axle dismount off the asymmetric bars…”

“My inner goddess is jumping up and down… clapping her hands like a five-year-old… please, let’s do this… otherwise we’ll end up alone, with lots of cats, and your classic novels to keep you company.”

“My inner goddess glows so bright she could light up Portland.”

And just in case you thought it was only a quirk of Bella’s, I must inform you that she uses this device for all her characters. Snowqueens Icedragon would later go on to write a version of the story from Edward’s perspective, and his “cock” is a personified character in the story. I shit you not.

“Miss Steele is a carnal treasure. She will be a joy to train. My cock twitches in agreement.”

This is how Icedragon thinks men think. This is unsurprising, given how she thinks women think. Perhaps it’s the way she and her fans are, but neither I nor anyone else I’ve talked to thinks this way.

Interview With a Sadist

Bella interviews Edward, and the fluttering of her eyelids is explicitly stated to match her heart-rate. We learn that Edward loves controlling and manipulating people and is quite good at it, and with everything else we learn about him throughout the course of the story, is it any wonder many are convinced he’s a psychopath? Edward instantly develops a sick obsession with Bella—sick enough to make vampire Edward’s infatuation look wholesome. As you would expect, the rich, dictatorial older man relentlessly stalks the young Bella with the eventual goal of making her his tortured concubine. Over the following weeks, we learn that Icedragon can’t even stick to her ill-conceived choice of tense.

“I am restless that night, tossing and turning.”

In case you’re hesitant to call Edward a stalker, Icedragon sets things straight by having him hack into and subsequently track her phone; approach her at work while appropriately joking about being a serial killer; and attack a sexual predator not out of compassion for Bella, but because he can’t stand the thought of anyone else having her. He manages to carry the unconscious young woman all the way to his penthouse without anyone with a shred of humanity noticing him or calling the peelers. So begins Edward Cullen’s manipulation of Bella Swan, which he carries out with the efficiency of a seasoned cult leader.

A Worse Love Story Than The Twilight Saga

Bella’s not exactly a likeable character, but Edward is nothing short of pure evil. This is in stark contrast to The Twilight Saga, where they’re both just about equally despicable—we hate Bella more only because we’re exposed to more of her. Here Bella is clearly being abused by a sadist with an increasing degree of power over her. His every move is consistent with that of a cult leader recruiting followers.

Edward begins by berating Bella for acting like the twenty-one-year-old she is. Then he tells her he wants a shag, but she has to sign a non-disclosure agreement first. Almost immediately afterwards he snogs her in the elevator. We’re meant to believe that his “love” for her causes him to lose control (which is creepy enough as it is), but it feels like he’s deliberately doing this to manipulate her. They go on one date in a helicopter and Bella signs the non-disclosure agreement. Immediately she asks:

“Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Edward?” Bella Swan, Fifty Shades of Grey

Spoken like someone who’s hiring a prostitute for the fifth time. Good job, Icedragon; you’ve made your heroine a john.

“No Isabella it doesn’t. Firstly… I don’t make love. I fuck…hard. Secondly, there‘s a lot more paperwork to do… and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for and you could still run for the hills. Come… I want to show you my playroom.” Edward Cullen, Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades' red velvet room filled with BDSM equipment.

Get stuffed, Edward. Now that’s out of the way… You know exactly where it goes from there. I don’t doubt that if you’re reading this you also know what colour and material Edward used to line the walls of his “playroom.” Edward explains that he’s a sadist and wants to beat her even though she’s not a masochist. In return he offers her “himself,” by which he means his money. Great! Now he’s the john!

Abuse, Abuse, and More Abuse

And so begins the main selling point of this garbage: the “sex” and the “BDSM.” The word “sex” is in quotes because sex without the proper consent is not sex; it is rape ! The acronym “BDSM” is in quotes because BDSM without the proper consent is not BDSM; it is abuse ! Edward tries to convince Bella to sign a contract that they both know he wouldn’t be able to enforce in court. By Edward’s actions thus far, I’m sure he’d try to enforce it all the same. Essentially the contract demands that she sign away her right to withdraw consent, making the contract illegal. Apparently BDSM contracts do exist, but I’ve heard the point of them is communication between the parties concerning their limits, as opposed to legally binding agreements allowing the dominant to straight-up rape the submissive—O, we’ll get to that.

You’re Doing BDSM Wrong!

Bella and Edward’s sick sexual “relationship” begins, and Edward takes great pleasure in beating Bella, who takes no pleasure in it at all—quite the opposite, in fact. In one scene, Edward asks Bella:

“How did you feel while I was hitting you… and after?” Edward Cullen, Fifty Shades of Grey

Bella answers:

“I didn’t like it… I’d rather you didn’t do it again.” Bella Swan, Fifty Shades of Grey

To which Edward responds:

“You weren’t meant to like it.” Edward Cullen, Fifty Shades of Grey

Er… I’m pretty sure she is meant to like it; that’s the whole damn point of BDSM, you pathetic hack of a writer!

For My Pleasure, Not Yours

“I want you and I want you now. And if you‘re not going to let me spank you – which you deserve – I‘m going to fuck you on the couch this minute, quickly, for my pleasure, not yours.” Edward Cullen, Fifty Shades of Grey.

This is not role-play; this is not BDSM. This is the definition of an abusive relationship! Now on to the worst part of this already irredeemable fan-fiction.

Straight-Up Rape

Bella soon decides to pretend to break up with Edward just to see how he’ll react, because Snowqueens Icedragon can’t even keep her abusive relationship consistent as to who’s the abuser. Soon Edward’s back to being the abuser, as he reacts by breaking into Bella’s home and raping her.

“No…” I protest, trying to kick him off. He stops. “If you struggle, I’ll tie your feet too. If you make a noise, Isabella, I will gag you. Keep quiet. Rosalie is probably outside listening right now.”

It doesn’t matter that her breaking up with him was only a sick prank; he doesn’t know that, and even if he did, breaking into someone’s house and penetrating them amidst their protests is rape—plain and simple. Even if we, the audience, know that her reason for protesting is likely that she’s self-conscious about her foot-odour (yes, really), she did not give consent. As far as I can tell, this is an unambiguous rape scene. Although this is among the best known, there are many scenes in this abhorrent story that likely meet the criteria for rape.

What Does Erika Mitchell Think of All This?

If you’re going to portray rape in literature (not that this is literature) then you have to make it clear that it’s a bad thing, to say the least. Not only that, but you also have to make any rape scenes you include sufficiently horrifying, and you need to properly portray the trauma that the victim will inevitably suffer both during and after the atrocity. Erika Mitchell does none of this, and her rape scenes are the worst I’ve ever read. This is likely because she’s wholly unaware that any of this is rape, as she made clear in an interview:

“It’s basically a love story… with some kinky sex in it…” E. L. James

George R. R. Martin can’t tell the difference between his rape scenes and his sex scenes, but at least he realizes that his book has rape scenes. Snowqueens Icedragon doesn’t even know there’s rape in her story at all. Martin constantly downplays the physical and psychological trauma of rape and tries to make his rapists sympathetic, but Icedragon presents hers as a fantasy for women to aspire to. Martin’s trying to be edgy, but Icedragon is actually trying to be romantic, and that makes her rape scenes even worse than his. It is possible, however, that she knows full well that what she’s portraying is rape and just doesn’t see a problem with it, as this is what she said in another interview:

“I think there’s so much shame surrounding sex… If you’re tied up then you can’t resist and you’re not responsible for your own actions, and then you can enjoy whatever’s happening to you, and you have less shame.” E. L. James

If this is what Snowqueens Icedragon thinks about rape, then she is deliberately ruining people’s lives, because there are many people whom this story influences. There are women who’ve taken to BDSM because they loved these books so much, and if the BDSM in Icedragon’s stories is what they’re trying to emulate, that means they’re doing BDSM wrong . I doubt I need tell you how dangerous it is for fans of this book to perform BDSM in an unsafe manner; I assume that’s common knowledge among everyone who isn’t a fan of this dreadful series.

A Harmful Work of Fiction

It’s clear to me (someone who’s decidedly repulsed by BDSM and who’s done as little research as I could) that Erika Mitchell, in true Meyer-fan fashion, did only the barest minimum of research before writing and publishing a book on the subject. There are certain people who are aroused and experience pleasure from certain levels of pain and humiliation, but Edward utterly dominating Bella in every facet of her life isn’t BDSM because Bella isn’t a masochist and therefore doesn’t enjoy it. BDSM, like any type of sex, is supposed to be consensual between two people who are really enjoying it. This is not what Fifty Shades portrays.

Bella Swan discovers Edward Cullen is a vampire.

There are women who stay in abusive relationships because their partners remind them of Edward Cullen (renamed Christian Grey). There are women who try unsafe things because a fan-fiction writer has convinced them that these things are romantic. I wonder whether they’d think it romantic were Edward/Christian not so unassessably wealthy. I’m sure there are men who’ve read it and now think the sorts of things Edward does are acceptable and consequently become abusers themselves.

The Worst Book Ever?

Fifty Shades of Grey is without a doubt the worst piece of media I have ever read, watched, or smelt. Erika Mitchell has been likened to “a Bronte devoid of talent,” but calling her “a Bronte devoid of talent” is insulting to the hypothetical idea of a Bronte devoid of talent; it takes a lot worse then a lack of talent to write something like this. It is worse than Game of Thrones; it’s worse than Violence Jack; it’s worse than Midori: Shōjo Tsubaki. At least Go Nagai clearly knew he was writing exploitation horror when he wrote Violence Jack. Sure, Violence Jack is a protagonist so bland he makes Harry Potter look like fucking Hamlet, but at least Go Nagai didn’t think he was writing an Aesop or something! Erika Mitchell actually thinks her rapesploitation crap is a deep romance that her readers should emulate; she makes George R. R. Martin look like the genius people think he is.

A True Abomination

Christian Grey shows Anastasia Steele his playroom in Fifty Shades.

I usually judge a work based not only on its quality, but also on its potential do real good or real evil. By this standard too, Fifty Shades of Grey is among the worst pieces of literature ever to infiltrate the mainstream; the worst if you ignore deliberate hate-propaganda. Even a lot of hate-propaganda has better storytelling, and I’d guess much of it has better prose. There exists in Erika Mitchell’s work no faint redeeming quality; indeed, it’s made me realize just how many redeeming qualities other bad stories have by comparison. If there’s any book whose copies should be rounded up, its original manuscript buried where no one will ever find it, it is this one. In none of the languages into which this book’s been translated will you ever find a curse severe enough to describe this abomination. Must I continue to think of ways to describe its horror? You get the picture; Fifty Shades of Grey is the pseudo-literary embodiment of pure evil. Don’t read it.

Long after writing this article, I did discover a worse work of fiction: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

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Fifty Shades Darker

By e. l. james.

After its publication, ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ became a massive hit and sold millions of copies. Though it was not as successful as its predecessor, the novel made waves worldwide.

About the Book

Written by Joshua Ehiosun

C2 certified writer.

As the second novel in the Fifty Shades trilogy, ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ had a fair share of recognition and fame. Though ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ received backlash for its romanticization of toxicity, the backlash from its sequel was on a smaller scale.

The Fifty Shades Trilogy is a series that has garnered the praise of many. However, people do not love the trilogy for its impeccable stories. They love it for its intense sexual content.

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ has a story that does not seem to have a lasting impact on its reader. The novel contains too much sex and irrelevant subplots that make it bland.

The story starts just three days after Ana’s breakup with Christian. Then without any progressive conflict, she gets back together with him after a short conversation; this makes the purpose of the first novel useless as there is no room for exploring Ana’s time away from Christian.

After Ana gets back with Christian, he starts changing for the better and becomes a more loving person. The problem with this layout is that it is too sudden. The story does not give the characters enough time to explore their nature and faults, and it just brings the characters back together and inculcates love as the cure for the years of trauma and suffering Christian faced.

Though the story tries to explain Christian’s character change by introducing Dr. Flynn, Christian’s therapist, into the scene, it does a terrible job when Dr. Flynn admits to Ana that her being in Christian’s life has done more change than him.

There are times when the story introduces useless subplots. An instance of an irrelevant subplot in the story is when Christian goes missing and returns just one day after having an accident with his helicopter; this made the novel unrealistic as it eluded the concept of the consequences of a helicopter crash and just made Christian miraculously unhurt.

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ used the first-person narrative to tell its story, making the dialogues rely on the primary character, Ana. Though the novel had a better plot than its predecessor, conversations lacked complexity and consequence.

In the story, there were many times when Ana’s interactions lacked depth. For example, her relationship with Jack Hyde relied on her conversations with him. However, there was no prominent danger with Jack, as her conversations with him never included any element of intensity or fear. The story also removed all effort to make the scene of Ana’s assault realistic. Other instances of poor dialoguing exist between Ana and Leila.

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ introduced better characters into its story. It also gave its primary characters more depth as it explored what made them the way they were. The novel made other characters like Jack Hyde and Leila impact the story.

Though some characters got developed better, Ana had little character development. She was still the same person in the first novel, and even with the heartbreak from Christian, her character progressed rather blandly.

Writing Style and Conclusion

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ employs the same writing style as its predecessor. Tension drives its emotional output as its shows how Christian’s traumatic past haunts his relationship with Ana. Though the novel has a style similar to its predecessor, there is a drastic reduction in the sexual tension because the tension shifts to the antagonists, Leila and Jack Hyde.

The novel had a good ending. However, it failed to maintain a lasting impression on the reader because it removed elements of realism and provided a diluted happy-ending approach.

Is Fifty Shades Darker a good story?

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ is a medially enjoyable novel. Though it contains many sexual scenes, it also tells a tale of hate, jealousy, greed, and trauma. People into extreme romance and eroticism will enjoy the story. However, without ignoring some errors, it will not be enjoyable.

How long does it take to read Fifty Shades Darker ?

With an average reading speed, ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ will take about nine hours to complete. However, with a slower reading rate, it will take even longer.

What are some good quotes from Fifty Shades Darker?

“But I’m a selfish man. I’ve wanted you since you fell into my office. You are exquisite, honest, warm, strong, witty, beguilingly innocent; the list is endless. I’m in awe of you. I want you, and the thought of anyone else having you is like a knife twisting in my dark soul.”

“I’m anything but fine. I feel like the sun has set and not risen for five days, Ana. I’m in perpetual night here.”

Is Fifty Shades Darker boring?

Many people have stated they dislike ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ because it is boring. Though the story actively tries to create tension, suspense, and action, it falls short for many people. However, the novel sold well in the millions, showing that many people liked it.

Fifty Shades Darker Review

50 Shades Darker by E.L. James Digital Art

Book Title: Fifty Shades Darker

Book Description: 'Fifty Shades Darker' delves into Christian and Ana's reunion and their journey in giving love another chance after their initial breakup.

Book Author: E. L. James

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Vintage Books

Date published: October 2, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-345-80358-1

Number Of Pages: 515

Writing Style
Lasting Effect on Reader

Fifty Shades Darker Review: Might Have Loved You Then

‘Fifty Shades Darker’ tells the story of Christian and Ana after their first breakup. Realizing they cannot live without each other, they give love a second chance.

There is action in the story
The dialogues seem lively
Too much sexual content
The characters are bland
The story contains plot holes

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A Hell of a Performance

April 18, 2024 issue

Norman Mailer; illustration by Lorenzo Gritti

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The Naked and the Dead and Selected Letters, 1945–1946

Writing in 1998, fifty years after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead , Norman Mailer called his younger self an “amateur,” by which he intended something between self-deprecation and self-praise, leaning toward the latter. He had grown up in Brooklyn in a Jewish family that was modest in both means and manners. “The one personality he found absolutely insupportable,” he wrote in middle age, was “the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” For much of his life, with mixed success, he did everything he could to put that personality behind him.

In September 1939, soon after Britain and France declared war on Germany, he went off to Harvard intending to study engineering, in part because of his boyhood interest in aviation but also to please his parents with the promise of a career. He stuck with the plan long enough to graduate in 1943 with an engineering degree, but along the way his ambitions shifted. In his sophomore year he wrote a gritty story that was published in Whit Burnett’s prestigious Story magazine about a boy conned and beaten up by pool hustlers. Mailer was en route to becoming Big Literary Man on Campus—a Hemingway wannabe who dropped into a boxer’s crouch and brandished his fists at anyone who displeased him. Six months out of college he was drafted and soon deployed to the Philippines, where he experienced “a couple of firefights and skirmishes” before serving in occupied Japan as a cook who, according to a friend, “never did learn to separate the yellows from the whites of the eggs.”

After returning from Japan and a short stint back in Brooklyn, Mailer resumed his sprint toward celebrity. He rented a shack on the dunes outside Provincetown with his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, whom he had met when she was a music student at Boston University and with whom he defied Harvard’s parietal rules with loud lovemaking in his dorm room. Intellectually and sexually adventurous, she introduced him to Freudian psychology and Marxist political theory, neither of which took up much space in the Harvard curriculum. In January 1944, a few weeks before his induction into the army, they married. “You love me,” he told her, “because I’m the only man you could ever ballast, all other men were ballast for you.”

In a series of remarkable letters to Bea written while he was in the army, from which his biographer and editor J. Michael Lennon includes a selection in the seventy-fifth-anniversary Library of America edition of The Naked and the Dead , Mailer described the “feeling of elation and excitement and awareness” of riding by night in an open army truck over trails vulnerable to ambush:

You know the thrill, love, of driving at night when there is only the singing of the tires and the lights of the vehicle cutting their brief swath through the vastness of the dark. When you add to that the animal awareness of danger and feel the solidness of the gun stock against your chest, it is really a heady experience. And of course all the men in the gloom of the van with the odd lights and glints on their helmets and faces and rifles, and the tension that holds them all as they peer into the night.

In another letter he describes his encounter with the corpse of an enemy soldier, its intestines protruding in “a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose” and “genitals…burnt away to tiny stumps.” “Here was a man,” he wrote to Bea, “and he wanted things, and the thought of his own death was always a little unbelievable to him. He had a childhood, a youth, and a young manhood, and there were all the dreams and all the memories. I wonder what he was like.”

Back from the war, in their snug bungalow on the Cape, Mailer drew on these letters for a novel about an assault on a fictional Japanese-held island called Anopopei. The result—the first big American novel to come out of World War II—may have been the work of an amateur, but any pro could have counted it as a hell of a performance.

Like many young writers, Mailer was in love with his own talent. He had an image-making mind and was loath to give up extravagant passages that should have been cut. When the Japanese break through the American perimeter, he compares the task of repelling them to “ejecting the rump of a fat man who had broken a hole through the stuffing of a couch and was now spluttering and wriggling his backside in an effort to escape.”

Sporadically overwritten, the book was also derivative—a pastiche of devices borrowed from writers who had impressed him in his college days. From John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. he appropriated the idea of “time-machine” segments—extended flashbacks into the lives of his characters before the war. From Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (“the biggest influence on Naked ,” he later told The New York Times ) he took the technique of breaking up the narrative with choral interludes in which characters step out of the story as if onto a stage to speak from a script. From James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan he got the ambition to make them sound authentically local: Roy Gallagher, an angry tough from South Boston; Julio Martinez, “small, slim and very handsome,” from San Antonio; “Red” Valsen, drained from years of riding flatcars to escape from coal mining in Montana. But all the “fugs” and “Ahms” and “gits” (“Ach” and “Ai” were reserved for Joey Goldstein from New York) tend to blur into a generic working-class patter. Early in the novel one soldier says to another, “You talk like something out of a comic book,” which an unfriendly critic might have said of the author himself. “ BAA—ROWWMM ” signifies mortar fire. “ BEE-YOWWWW…BEE-YOWWWW ” is the sound of ricocheted bullets spattering dirt.

But the juvenilities did little to diminish the power of the book. Mailer wrote about these men with a rare mixture of compassion and candor, as when he described Gallagher’s numbness at the news, delivered by the chaplain, that his wife has died in childbirth, and then his mute agony as, day after day, he receives letters from her reporting her preparations for the baby’s arrival. The writing is precise and graphic—a far cry from magazine platitudes about G.I. Joe, or what Mailer called “the smiling soldiers in the advertisements.” Men shit themselves out of fear, savor pornographic thoughts as aids to masturbation, find themselves stirred by the sight of other men’s bodies, fart in winning competition with the smells of the jungle, and torment defenseless prisoners before shooting them—bothered by “killing . . . far less than discovering some ants in their bedding.”

In fact the book was so raw that Little, Brown, the first publisher to which Mailer offered it, rejected it on the grounds of obscenity. Rinehart and Company made a better call. Published on May 4, 1948, The Naked and the Dead hit the top of The New York Times ’s best-seller list and stayed there for three months, selling more than 200,000 copies in the first year and over three million since.

Writing some twenty years later in the midst of the Vietnam War, Diana Trilling recalled that to her generation (she was eighteen years older) Mailer seemed to speak with “the hot breath of the future.” He set the stage, and the standard, for decades of war writing to follow: James Jones on cruelties inflicted with impunity by officers upon enlisted men, J.D. Salinger on what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, Joseph Heller on the fine line between madness and sanity, to name a few. The themes of The Naked and the Dead —the inability of reason to constrain instinct; the vicissitudes of chance; the inscrutability of motive; the unknowability of other lives; the impulse to blame others, especially the “fuggin Yids,” for one’s suffering; the male fear of female sexuality as rapacious and unappeasable (the soldiers are haunted by thoughts of their women back home in the arms of other men)—stayed with Mailer for the rest of his writing life.

But the real distinction of the book was the propulsive force of the narrative, which follows a platoon through perilous terrain behind enemy lines on a mission that turns deadly for some and proves futile for all. Despite long stretches of enervating days and nights during which the men do little but search through memories for something to distract them from their dread, Mailer managed to sustain an atmosphere of unrelenting tension. Their senses, dulled by exhaustion, come alive in spikes of panic as the men move through the “dark and murmurous” jungle, straining to distinguish the sound of enemy footsteps from the hum of “the crickets and frogs and lizards thrumming the brush, the soughing of the trees.”

Although they patrol in groups or pairs, each man is radically alone, confined to a blinkered view of a war whose larger contours are invisible to him as he concentrates on his own survival. The landscape through which he makes his solitary way is both real and allegorical, as if he were not a particular person but a fragile, pitiable, yet somehow dignified representative of humankind.

In charge of these men is Major General Edward Cummings, “a tyrant with a velvet voice” who commands a force of six thousand facing—but rarely seeing—a slightly smaller Japanese force dug in a few miles east of where the Americans have come ashore. Cummings thinks back fondly to the last war, when, as a junior officer, he watched infantrymen advance through no-man’s-land toward the enemy trench:

The men move slowly now, leaning forward as if striding into the wind. He is fascinated by the sluggishness of it all, the lethargy with which they advance and fall. There seems no pattern to the attack, no volition to the men; they advance in every direction like floating leaves in a pool disturbed by a stone, and yet there is a cumulative movement forward. The ants in the final sense all go in one direction.

But in this new war, venturing out of the bivouac means entering the jungle equivalent of no-man’s-land, and the “ants” are less compliant. Platoon leaders file false patrol reports after nights spent sheltering in a ditch. Wounded men scratch and pull at their stitches in the hope of delaying their release from the field hospital.

To overcome the feigning and stalling, Cummings determines to turn his men into instruments of his will. He is Mailer’s Ahab. Like the mad captain of Moby-Dick , he has what Melville called “unsurrenderable wilfulness” in his “riveted glance.” One “could touch the surface of Cummings’s eyeballs,” Mailer writes, “and the eyes would not blink.”

So Cummings devises a plan. He will dispatch a reconnaissance platoon by sea to the south coast of Anopopei, from which it will make its way northward through the jungle and across a mountain range that bisects the length of the island like a spine. The platoon’s mission is to take and hold Botoi Bay, an inlet on the north shore, until a battalion of assault troops can land there to attack Japanese forces. Cummings boasts to himself of the “psychological soundness” of this plan, because once the attack force reaches the bay, the men will find that “their only security would be to drive ahead and meet their own troops.” With their backs to the sea, their fear of retreat will overcome their fear of advance.

Cummings is a connoisseur of fear. “I don’t care what kind of man you give me,” he explains to his favorite junior officer, Lieutenant Robert Hearn. “If I have him long enough, I’ll make him afraid.” Hearn is Starbuck to Cummings’s Ahab. (Lest we miss the point, Mailer makes Hearn a Harvard man who has written a senior thesis entitled “The Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville.”) The general explains to him that fear is the key not only to the war but to the postwar social order. Hitler—not the timid bureaucrats of the Allied democracies—is the best “interpreter of twentieth-century man” because he understands that people are driven not by a craving for solidarity or justice (as sentimental liberals would like to believe) but by hatred, terror, and awe. “You can consider the Army…a preview of the future,” Cummings says, because this “is going to be the reactionary’s century.” Germany will lose the war, but the concept of fascism has already proved “sound enough,” and the United States will inherit it and carry it to fruition.

Mailer found these prophecies all too persuasive. Two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote to Bea that while “a good part of me approves anything which will shorten the war and get me home sooner,” the news filled him with dread. What had been a “pleasurable calculation in the physics I studied” has propelled humanity toward “the final victory of the machine.” Henceforth the world will be “controlled by a few men, politicians and technicians” who regard the masses as nothing more than grunts and fodder. He told Bea that he had met such men, for whom war was an abstraction in which human beings are incinerated by weapons fired from a hygienic distance, and that “the personification they give their machines nauseates me.”

When that letter was written, in August 1945, the roster of characters in Mailer’s planned novel had not yet fully taken form. Cummings would be the cold “technician” who regards war as an abstract game of charts and maps. But in a preview of Dr. Strangelove (Mailer was enthralled by Kubrick’s film when it appeared in 1964), Cummings surprises himself by becoming aroused by “the mass of the gun” when he fires a piece of ordnance—a pleasure he hasn’t felt since his cadet days at West Point:

Just before he fired he could see it all, the sharp detumescent roar of the gun, the long soaring plunge of the shell through the night sky, its downward whistle, and the moments of complete and primordial terror for the Japanese at the other end when it landed. An odd ecstasy stirred his limbs for a moment, was gone before he was quite aware of it.

This figure of the pallid technocrat who channels his obstructed libido into a kind of necrophilia was to reappear in many variations in Mailer’s subsequent writing. In a shabby bit of pop psychology, he associated Cummings with homosexuality, planting clues of another Melvillean model: just as Mr. Claggart in Billy Budd transmutes his self-contempt into hatred for the man he wants to love, Cummings comes to loathe Hearn.

By 1955, in an essay entitled “The Homosexual Villain,” Mailer disavowed what he called his “homosexual bias” and confessed that “I have been as guilty as any contemporary novelist in attributing unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations to the homosexual (or more accurately, bisexual) characters in my novels.” But he never quite delivered on the mea culpa. As Kate Millett put it in a memorable takedown in Sexual Politics (1970), Mailer remained “a prisoner of the virility cult”—though she conceded that he was “never incapable of analyzing” the cult to which he belonged.

Beginning in the early 1950s he did just that: he analyzed the cult in scores of essays, stories, and novels, often with caustic humor at his own expense. In “Great in the Hay” (1950), he turned the rivalry between a pair of Hollywood producers—Bert and Al, both bald, short, and nominally married—into a mock parable. Bert, eager to understand why so many women crave Al’s company in bed, hires a detective to find out. The sleuth proceeds to interview a sampling of Al’s lovers but comes away with nothing more than a “mish-mosh” of contradictory testimonials. He’s a “master of sexpertise,” says Hortense; he loves to spend money, says Georgia; he “lets me throw him around,” says Claudia Jane; he makes love “with purity and simplicity,” according to Fay, “which intensifies my hard-won religious conversion.” Meanwhile, hopelessly depressed despite the accolades, Al blows his brains out. Bert’s only reaction is regret at having failed to discover the secret of Al’s bedroom success.

At the other end of the decade, in “The Time of Her Time” (1959), Mailer produced a comic tour de force that was again somehow both frivolous and serious. A retired bullfighter renowned for his sexual stamina (this one’s for you, Papa Hemingway) exhausts himself over several nights trying to bring a Jewish college girl to her first orgasm. His failures provoke her to shame him, initially with words (“I hate inept men”), then with a finger in his anus that sends him off to the races again. After he manages at last to get her to the finish line by returning the favor of penetrating her “seat of all stubbornness, tight as a vise,” she gathers up her things and sneers at his reputation for priapic prowess: “Your whole life is a lie . . . and you do nothing but run away from the homosexual that is you.” Once she’s gone, her would-be conquistador reports that “like a real killer, she did not look back, and was out the door before I could rise to tell her that she was a hero to me.”

In these preposterous stories—the former a padded joke, the latter a rollicking farce—Mailer held up for scrutiny men who use women as props in a variety show starring themselves. Swaggering, proud, always randy, they are avatars of the author, whom the shrewd critic Richard Poirier once called a “worried copulator”—a cocksure advocate of the unregulated life who was simultaneously appalled by his unrestrained self.

Mailer reveled in his contradictions. In “The Time of Her Time” he savored the psychological victory of a young woman over a self-appointed “Village stickman.” A decade later, responding to Millett in the infamous The Prisoner of Sex (1971), he railed against feminism as an emasculating plot against men acting in accordance with their instincts. In the best book of his later years, The Executioner’s Song (1979), he portrayed a murderer insouciant about his cruelty yet desperate for his own execution. In An American Dream (1965), about a jealous husband who murders his wife for taunting him with her infidelities, he reprised with a mixture of shame and self-exoneration the most odious act of his own life—his 1960 attack on his second wife, Adele Morales, whom he almost killed in an alcoholic rage by stabbing her with a penknife.

With an unstable mixture of self-indulgence and self-awareness, Mailer celebrated men akin to himself for using women as equipment for recreation, but he also recoiled from such men. He was often glib, as when he wrote in a 1960 essay on JFK that “violence was locked with creativity.” But he could be bracingly honest too, as in The Armies of the Night (1968), where he acknowledged that the

modest everyday fellow of his daily round was servant to a wild man in himself: the gent did not appear so very often, sometimes so rarely as once a month, sometimes not even twice a year, and he sometimes came when Mailer was frightened and furious at the fear, sometimes he came just to get a breath of air. He was indispensable, however, and Mailer was even fond of him for the wild man was witty in his own wild way and absolutely fearless…. He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast—no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his reach.

Given Mailer’s irresolution about himself, it’s not surprising that his most incisive critics have often been divided among and within themselves in their judgments of him. Joan Didion greeted An American Dream as “the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby .” Elizabeth Hardwick, with equal conviction, deemed it “an intellectual and literary disaster, poorly written, morally foolish and intellectually empty.” Yet she suspected that the novel’s hero-villain was “only pretending, wretchedly hoping to be an evil spirit,” and she went on to muse that “perhaps Mailer’s mistake has been to think that he should be, in his writings, a new Lucifer. The odd thing is that his best gifts are often genial. These gifts are serious ones, always unexpected and original.”

A few months ago I dipped into the Harvard archive hoping to learn more about Mailer’s early years. Among the treasures is a trove of letters from his college friend Adeline Lubell, who, as a junior editor at Little, Brown, championed The Naked and the Dead , and who treated him for the rest of his life to equal measures of censure and affection. In a letter of June 5, 1952, there’s a wonderfully vivid sentence: “You carry the myth of yourself in your hand all the time and open your palm to look at it.” But a few lines later she thanks the incorrigible narcissist for his “sweetness” and “munificence” and for being a steadfast friend.

It is often remarked that The Naked and the Dead , published to huge acclaim when Mailer was twenty-five, “ruined” him (Caleb Crain’s word). It’s true that early success overfed his ravenous ego, but it’s also true that he recognized the corrosive effects of his fame. As the rave reviews rolled in, he wrote in his journal:

I feel trapped. My anonymity is lost, and the book I wrote to avoid having to expose my mediocre talents in harsher market places has ended in this psychological sense by betraying me…. I feel myself more empty than I ever have, and to fill the vacuum…I need praise.

Mailer saw in himself a man spiraling down into addiction. “Each good review gives fuel, each warm letter, but as time goes by, I need more and more for less and less effect.”

After the failed experiments Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), seeking to retrieve the taste of fame, he began to deflect his energies into what Crain calls his “metaliterary career”—actor; boxer; TV talk show chattermeister; political candidate; journalist reporting mainly on himself; champion of Jack Henry Abbott, another incarcerated murderer who, upon release, murdered again * ; filmmaker; serial provocateur. There was a kind of antic mania in Mailer the self-publicist, who likened himself to “the publicity made actress who has to see her face and name more and more to believe in her reality, and of course loses the line between her own personality, and the one created for her by the papers.”

Seventy-five years on, reading the work that first made him famous is an exhilarating experience. When the older Mailer looked back and called his younger self an amateur, part of what he had in mind was the joy of a young man defying his limits. This was the joy he relished in Melville (he complained to Lubell that “none of the reviewers…have seen fit to see…the Melville influence”), who was just past thirty when he published Moby-Dick and brayed to the world of his own genius. With the same genial arrogance, Mailer proclaimed in Advertisements for Myself (1959) that “my present and future work…will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”

But already in The Naked and the Dead one finds the peculiar combination of bravado and diffidence that distinguished him throughout his career. Writing in the fiftieth-anniversary edition, he acknowledged a second literary master. He recalled that “most mornings before he commenced his own work,” he read Anna Karenina , which enlarged “the limited perceptions of a twenty-four-year-old” through “what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy.” What he learned was that “compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe”—that to feel pity or sorrow for the suffering of others is not to forgo judgment or excuse their cruelties. Tolstoy did not countenance Karenin’s callousness, or Vronsky’s vanity, or Anna’s adultery, yet he loved them all the same.

Mailer was an amalgam of those characters—vain, sometimes callous, chronically adulterous, and guilty of self-adulation, as if auditioning for the not-yet written role of Mickey Sabbath. But behind the macho posturing was an almost sheepish gentleness. An egotist of “curious disproportions” (his words), he harbored “endless blendings of virtue and corruption.” The Naked and the Dead remains a book of undiminished force because he loved its fallible warriors—who combined within themselves courage and cowardice, lying and truth-telling, selfishness and selflessness—with the same clear-eyed devotion that he lavished on himself.

The Corruption Playbook

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The New York Review published several pieces by Abbott, beginning with excerpts from his letters under the title “In Prison,” introduced by Mailer, in the issue of June 26, 1980. ↩

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This photo still life shows a hardcover edition of “Carrie” on a brown shag carpet, next to an orange rotary-dial telephone and a section of chair caning with an analog clock balanced on top. The wall behind them is paneled wood.

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

“Carrie” was published in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains its enduring appeal.

Credit... Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times

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By Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and many other books. Her latest, “Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023,” will be published in October. This essay is adapted from her introduction to the anniversary edition of “Carrie,” published this month by Vintage.

March 25, 2024

Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon.

“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.

But his wife, Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a curious temperament — fished them out, uncrinkled them, read them, and famously convinced King to continue the story. She wanted to know how it would come out, and such desires on the part of readers are perhaps the best motivation a writer can have.

King proceeded. The novel grew into a book with many voices. First, of course, there is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school students and by the entire town of Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning, pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-door neighbor who witnessed a violent display of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic manifestations; from various journalistic pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the only one of Carrie’s female classmates to attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta White.”

A young Stephen King wears a plaid sports coat over a dark button-down shirt open at the very wide collar. He has big square glasses and long sideburns, and his shaggy dark hair is parted on the right.

Then there are the inner voices of various other characters, as overheard by Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes telepathic and can listen in on the silent thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her inner life to them. Together, the many voices tell the horrifying tale.

What is it about “Carrie” that has intrigued me? It’s one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society.

Female figures with quasi-supernatural powers seem to pop up in literature at times when the struggle for women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of the 19th century, when pressure for more equality was building; its electrically gifted heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a thought, and much verbiage is expended on male anxieties about what might happen — especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed train her sights on world domination. (Naomi Alderman, whose novel “The Power” coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement, went one better and gave most young girls the ability to kill by shooting out energy rays, like electric eels.)

“Carrie” was written in the early 1970s, when the second-wave women’s movement was at full throttle. There are a couple of nods to this new form of feminism in the novel, and King himself has said that he was nervously aware of its implications for men of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,” Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s, which is seen as already outmoded, though still dangerous. The female villain, Chris Hargensen, is the archetypical Queen Bee cruelty ringleader of high school drama, the negative version of Sisterhood Is Powerful.

A side note on names. “Chris” — for “Christine,” for “Christ” — is self-evidently ironic: Chris is an anti-savior. “Carrie White” is an interesting combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to point out, is not a nickname for Carol or Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving kindness, the most important virtue in the Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how its inhabitants felt when they discovered in 1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the year in which “Carrie” is set.)

Most particularly, charitable loving kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own child. Carrie herself wavers between love and forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the hatred of the town that channels itself through her, tips her over the edge and transforms her into an angel of destruction.

As for “White,” you might be inclined to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns, or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent — but also please consider “white trash.” In fact, read the book of that name by Nancy Isenberg; and, for added raw and gritty details, read the novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” by Carolyn Chute. The white underclass has existed in America from the beginning, and white trashers going back generations are thick on the ground in Maine, Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he has mined extensively over the course of his career.

He based the situation of Carrie on two girls from that underclass whom he knew at school, both of them marked by poverty and decaying clothing, both of them taunted and despised and destroyed by their fellow students. Everyone in the town was an underdog in the carefully calibrated class structure of America — not for them the fancy private schools and university educations, unless they got really, really lucky — but there are no dogs so under that they don’t welcome another dog even lower in the social scheme, to be made use of as a blank screen onto which all the things they dislike about their own positions may be projected. Given a choice between dishing out the contempt and rejection and being the recipient of it, most will choose to dish out. And so it was with King, and so it is with Sue Snell, though both later repent.

King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the most literary of forms, especially when it comes to the supernatural, which must perforce be inspired by already existing tales and books. All the quasi-scientific hocus-pocus about the genetic inheritability of telekinesis is just cover-up (as is the “natural” source of Ayesha’s powers in “She,” and the something-in-the-drinking-water, experiment-gone-wrong stuff in “The Power”: You can’t just say “miracle” or “witch” anymore and get instant credibility).

But underneath the “horror,” in King, is always the real horror: the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today. “I went to school with kids who wore the same neckdirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets and nothing but air in their Thermoses,” King says in “On Writing.” The ultimate horror, for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty, and especially cruelty to children. It is this that distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature, the side that prompts us to take care of others.

I think this is part of King’s widespread appeal. Yes, he shows us weird stuff, but in the context of the actual. The clock, the sofa, the religious paintings on the walls — all the daily objects that Carrie explodes during her rampage — these are drawn from life, as is the everyday sadism of the high school kids that makes “Carrie” feel as frighteningly relevant as ever.

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