Bodice Tipplers – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Aye lads and lassies and wee bairns (wait, this is no place for wee bairns!) This is our hundredth episode, to our vast surprise, so we're gonna make enemies and talk about Outlander! He's Jamie, the only feminist in eighteenth century Scotland! She's Claire, a time traveling nurse with a boring husband! Buckle up, sassenachs, because if you know this book you know you're about to trip over a giant content warning.

The book, the TV show, and absolutely this podcast have a great big neon "sexual assault" warning on them. There is no ignoring the rape in Outlander - it's an omnipresent (and equal opportunity!) threat, it's not something you could just skip a few pages and miss, they probably don't even have a word for it in the way that fish don't have a word for water. Forget it, Jake, it's Outlander. It's traumatic and has real emotional and physical consequences and if it's something you prefer to avoid you definitely should not read, watch, or listen here. There's also some... I don't know how to put this, some spousal discipline? It doesn't really read as abusive, but he does hit her with a belt, which half of us were kinda into and half of us were absolutely not into, so your mileage may vary. And of course there's quite a bit of beating and murdering and witch burning and torturing, just for variety.

He's Stephan, a time travelling good Nazi! She's Laura, a woman he will not leave alone! It's Dean Koontz's Lightning, the first of our summer road trip books! To explain the amazing graphic my husband ran up for this - I am almost certain this is Koontz's own Terminator fanfic, predicting Badass T2 Sarah Connor years before that movie came out.

If you didn't see this amazing profile of Dean Koontz in the Washington Post last year please enjoy this gift link! Why yes, it is weird! He really does wear his hair like that! Is it his hair? I dunno, I mean, I'm sure he owns it, yes. Every day! All the time! His wife just walks into a room and there it is! People's lives, man!

So if you're new to the Koontz, prepare for some damn content warnings - this one's got wack-ass ableism, Fated Child Sex Abuse, the strangest fat shaming I've ever seen, kids burning alive, oh yeah Nazis (at least they're the bad guys, never thought I'd live to have to say that!), I probably forgot some. I will say that when we call this guy a "good Nazi" what we mean is a traitor to the Nazi cause, not the other thing. We wouldn't be reading one with the other thing.

Happy Halloween! He's Clare, a baron with a very expensive contractor's bill and a suspicious number of black armbands in his wardrobe. She's Lucy, a sheltered seventeen year old girl with a big inheritance and absolutely no friends anywhere. What a great combination! It's Greygallows by Barbara Michaels, who is also Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Mertz and probably a ton of other names - you may remember that we did an episode on her Devil May Care last year for Halloween, and that book has a guest appearance from the actual Christian devil! Old Scratch! The Father of Lies! The Prince of Darkness! This one, sadly, does not - but it's a delightful read and a great book for spooky season.

Fair warning, it includes some extremely realistic and therefore disturbing depictions of spousal abuse, most notably the scariest gaslighting I've seen in a book in a long time but also financial, emotional, and physical abuse with some attempted murder thrown in. It's not gratuitous at all - it's very well done and the heroine's legal helplessness under 19th century British law is definitely a major point of the book, but it is definitely going to hit too close to home for some people.

Welcome to our fourth (!) annual AnneRiceoween extravaganza featuring The Vampire Armand! We skipped Memnoch the Devil because we just did not want to read it, but don't worry, this book makes us find out what happened in it anyway! As usual, this episode features Friend of the Podcast Dr. Claire Mischker, weird audio (we had to change our remote recording platform so we all sound like we're living in separate wells) and an absurdly long runtime!

This book has some heavier content warnings than you'd even expect from a vampire book - it has a lot of sexual abuse both of children and adults, some child sex trafficking, monastic immurement, murder, bad dads both heavenly and temporal, way too much of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, and of course all the traditional vampire stuff like nonconsensual blood drinking and wallowing in angst. Oh, and it wouldn't be an Anne Rice book if it didn't have a long passage about becoming a vampire and shitting your pants.

The book I tried to remember and couldn't quite is Goddess of Filth by V. Castro - read it to decolonize your ideas about possession!

He's Vanyel, the whiniest teenager ever chosen for a top government position by a horse! He's Tylendel, doomed twin and bad decision maker! Forget it, Jake, it's Valdemar! This is the first in Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage trilogy, Magic's Pawn - it is not a romance novel, there is no happy ending, there are only tears. The tears are, in fact, the point. It's the first book a young Sara ever read about love between two impossibly beautiful young men, plus it has omg horsies - so yes, I imprinted on it like a duckling.

There are some pretty intense topics in this book - it's got really heavy suicidal ideation and suicide, it's got a bitchy horse-what-ain't-no-horse who also dies by suicide, it's got some bad family business and some pretty intense homophobia, it's got some Mystic Native tropes, and if you read the other books in the trilogy you're going to run into some truly traumatic sexual assault and incest. Whee!

As promised, here's a write-up of Lackey's wild ride at Dragon Con in 1997! It really does involve a man who calls himself Pony White claiming he got attacked by ninjas. You gotta read the whole thing to get the whole story.

From the same source, if you're dying to know what "filk" is, here's a pretty good explainer with examples.

She's Merry, a naïve teenager who mostly sits around waiting for something to happen. He's Devon, the evil pirate who kidnaps her mostly by accident. It's the War of 1812!

Laura London is actually Tom and Sharon Curtis; we previously did a Loveswept by them that was a lot of fun, Lightning That Lingers. Check it out!

We've been sleeping on this book for forever - it actually got recommended to Sara by a coworker years ago, when we first started, and we should have read it then because it's a blast. The best part, of course, is everybody who isn't Devon - there's a band of Merry Men, most notably Dread Pirate Rand and Disaster Bi Cat, but don't forget Ship Pet Raven who is a person and Best Pirate Dennis who is a pig. It does have a genuinely shocking amount of threatened and past rape for such a fun and fluffy book, most of which are pretty abstract but there's some tragic backstory to some characters, some of it you'll expect and some of it you won't. And of course there's dirty deeds, some of which are quite expensive - although you'd expect more pirating? Honestly though if I'd have known this book had a queer androgynous silver haired bitchy pirate I'd have been on it thirty years ago.

Welcome to the second episode of our Jackie July extravaganza! This one is on Hollywood Wives, which was reissued this month. Many things happen in this book to many people! Some of them seem medically improbable! Watch Elaine, Ross, Neil, Montana, Gina, Buddy, Angel, Randy, Karen, and more as they call each other on the telephone and have exhausting sex with each other!  It's bananas and complicated but it is a ton of fun.

Content warnings in this book: everything. Literally everything. We got sex murdering, incest, Evil Gays, Evil Lesbians, a ton of sexualization and trafficking of young teenagers, a genuinely upsetting botched abortion, baby selling - it's in there.  (Surprisingly, this has a lot less weight talk and disordered eating than Scruples?  Then again, the modelling industry has less weight talk and disordered eating than Scruples.)

We also talk about the launch of our new Patreon subscriber bonus episodes, starting with the Hollywood Wives miniseries - now sadly delayed for the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, because even a 1985 TV miniseries is struck work.  Yes, greedy billionaires are standing in between you and finding out what Candace Bergen as Elaine wore to the party she hosted an hour after getting out of department store lockup!  What can you do to support striking workers, you ask?  If you're local to a picket line, you can join the picket or donate food and water - check the WGA and SAG-AFTRA picket schedules! You can also donate to fundraisers like the Entertainment Community Fund - remember, most striking workers aren't rich A-list stars, and they're giving up a lot to strike. 

Welcome to Jackie July!  We're dedicating this month to listener favorite Jackie Collins because we're in the middle of a Jackaissance - a fancy new 40th anniversary edition of Hollywood Wives is coming out (introduction by Colleen Hoover!) and two of her daughters, Rory and Tiffany, are doing press for it.  We had a blast sitting down for an interview with them and we think you'll enjoy it, too.  Later this month we'll dedicate an episode to Hollywood Wives and then we'll have an episode on the insane 1985 miniseries (Candice Bergen! Robert Stack! Anthony Hopkins?!) as a special treat for our Patreon subscribers.

In the interview we talk a lot about Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story - it's a 2021 documentary available on Netflix in the US and various other places abroad; it's a lot of fun and we really recommend it.

Have we done a Jackie Collins book before?  You bet your sweet patootie we have!  Our 45th episode was on Lucky - check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts!

For more Jackie content, her website has a ton of fun content and links to her social media, which continues to be updated with archival material and release updates!  Check it out at jackiecollins.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

She's Luna, in witness protection!  He's Elar, a horny eel monster!  It's Courtney's birthday so we're going off script and reading Electrified by the Eel, a modern paranormal romance short!  (Come for the eel sex, stay for the heartfelt tangential argument about the number and location of centaur dicks.)

So the book itself notes trigger warnings for drowning - look, it should have also mentioned a guy gets raped to death by lady eels (I mean, he had it coming, it's fine, nobody's gonna shed a tear for ol' Rick, but it's something you might want to note?)  Also it's kind of a breeding fantasy and nobody has informed Luna of this fact, so that might be a bit of an issue for some people.  Also this dude is a fish man but according to the cover he has nipples, so any animal biologist listeners are going to need a warning.  I mean, eel reproduction is really mysterious!  Maybe this is, in fact, how it works!

Buckle up Jane, it's the Regency!  Harriet is a fossil hunter!  Gideon is a viscount, which is evidently a job!  He's grim and broody and has an Evil Past full of Scandals and also a cool scar!  She's Tracy Flick in a pelisse!  There are smugglers!  And parties!  It's Amanda Quick's Ravished!

Surprise - nobody actually gets ravished in this book.  I know, right?  There's an attempted rape that's foiled by Wile E. Coyoteing a boulder onto the guy, which is the way I'd like to see all rapists handled from here on out.  There is also an exceedingly gentle kidnapping, some ugly murders in the past including one set up to make a young woman look like she died by suicide, and an awful lot of fossil talk.  This author, who also writes as Jayne Ann Krentz and several other pseudonyms,  often writes men who are, ahem, very forceful - in this book he's absolutely met his match and I think this one will be fine even for people who are turned off by that aspect of her earlier books.