Bad Sex Award

I’m thankful that I haven’t read anything by either of these folks. 

The 76-year-old American novelist was a finalist for this year’s Bad Sex prize for his description of an explosive oral encounter in his latest book, “The Widows of Eastwick,” but lost out to British writer Rachel Johnson.

Johnson won for a passage in her satirical novel “Shire Hell” that describes a woman in the midst of a “mounting, Wagnerian crescendo” wondering whether “the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance.” Cats and moths also make metaphorical appearances.

“All the passages this year are equally awful, but Rachel Johnson’s struck us because of the mixture of cliche and euphemism,” said the magazine’s deputy editor, Tom Fleming. “There were a couple of really bad animal metaphors in there.”

Johnson was due to receive the prize — which comes with a bottle of champagne and a plaster foot — from actor Dominic West, star of “The Wire,” at a ceremony in London. Fleming said the foot is intended as “an abstract representation of sex.”