Monday was a bad day. Not because it was my first day back after a week in Hawaii or because my sunburn still hurt or because June Gloom has hit SoCal once again and I miss the sun.
No, it was because E.L. James announced via Instagram an upcoming release of a new 50 Shades of Shit book.
The book, Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, will — as you can probably tell from the title — be told from the point of view of Christian Grey, the billionaire protagonist of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Grey will be available on June 18, but has already topped the Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble bestseller lists, according to Entertainment Weekly. I weep.
“Christian is a complex character,” James said in an official press release, “and readers have always been fascinated by his desires and motivations, and his troubled past. Also, as anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows, there are two sides to every story. It’s been a great pleasure to return to my happy place—writing, being with Christian and Ana in their universe, and working with the fantastic team at Vintage.”
Before the movie adaptation was released this February, just before Valentine’s Day, I made it pretty clear what my opinion of Fifty Shades is. I wrote that I did “not understand the wild popularity that surrounds this trash of a story with zero redeeming qualities that relies on nothing but nakedness and emotional manipulation in the Pacific Northwest.”
If you read some of the comments at the bottom of the EW.com story regarding the bestseller lists, some people get pretty testy about their right to read whatever they want to. And they are right — they are free to love these books as much as I hate them. I routinely get worlds of shit for owning all seven seasons of The Golden Girls on DVD and make no apologies for that.
But it continues to baffle me how such poorly written books can sell with such gusto. James decided to write this iteration for the fans that asked for it. The opening line of Grey reads: “This book is dedicated to those readers who asked… and asked… and asked… and asked for this.”
That’s smart on her part, for sure, but not something I can wrap my brain around. Does this mean we’re going to have to sit through an extra movie as a result? When will the madness end? I fear this is going to turn into the literary version of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette: a train wreck to continue for all of eternity.
