Have you ever had a really bad sexual experience? Don’t rack your brains trying to remember. In fact, you don’t even have to be in a relationship to have one. You could just as well read a novel that has picked up the latest Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
This time around, Britain’s “most dreaded literary prize” went to the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars, American wordsmith David Guterson.
The notorious award-winning Ed King is his immodest modern answer to one of Sophocles’ key plays, Oedipus Rex whose title character, Oedipus, kills his father and marries his mother.
Although the writer couldn’t accept the prize in person, he promptly responded to his “bad sex” victory.
“Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I’m not in the least bit surprised,” the author of Ed King stated.
Indeed, it’s not hard to see why the award organizers picked Guterson’s passage describing “the part where a mother has sex with her son.”
“Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch,” the narrator continues.
In Freudian theory, the term Oedipus complex is used to describe father-son psycho-sexual competition for possession of the mother.