The greatest and most profilic romance author you’ve never heard of, D’Ancey LaGuarde, is the subject of this collecrion of blurbs, extracts, quizzes, tips and commentary curated by Alice Fraser,
Finding his works through a glitch in the space-time continuum, Fraser allows us to enter the world of pirates, creamy breasts, seal people. octopods, and dazzling dukes from all historical time periods.
It’s utterly hilarious from the first page, conjuring up an author in cape and monocle who details the sexual habits of his heroes, heroines, and creatures in the most florid of ways, while the synopses cause bursts of laughter as you wade through the oeuvre of an author who writes a book every few days, self-publishes, and stocks them in the most curious of places.
As the book progresses it all becomes more and more ridiculous, with both authors providing footnotes until Fraser eventually confesses that she made it all up.
A Passion for Passion is the weird heart of romance, the power of the penis, and the heaving breast of the ingenue. It is “an extreme commitment to silliness in the name of nothing more that celebrating the stupid things that make us happy”.
An obsession with horses and with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who appears in all sorts of guises through the D’Ancey catalogue, jostles with the traditional and the throuple, the vampiric and the alien.
There are even some illustrations of D’Ancey book covers, brilliantly conveyed and also prone to causing a stifled giggle. Written like a serious academic tract, Fraser’s book is one I found hard to put down, and the depiction of “Romance, Mystery, Science Fictioon and Historico-superanatural bang-fests” is just sublime.
If you enjoy sensual romance with the impossibly rippled abs of the hero and his hands that can circle a woman’s impossibly small waist while being drawn to her impossibly large bust (one book is rated “B for boobs”) then you will appreciate how daft this book is, and how far the idea can be taken.
Download it in “all good newsagents and bad bookshops”, find it “on a park bench near you” dig “into the dunes at high tide” or seek out “a disused phone box”.
I even guffawed at the quotes from reviews: “The most graphic description of a leopard’s penis we’ve ever seen – The Guardian”, and the “taxonimies of dukes” that reveals the stereotypes beloved of the likes of Mills and Boon.
A Passion for Passion is the guidebook you never knew you wanted to the prolific writings of D’Ancey LaGuarde, whose celebration of diversity and obsession with the judicious placement of the finger populates his life’s work.
Delightfully mucky and murky and attractively weird and wacky, this book may make a good present for the person you seek to surprise.
A Passion for Passion: a Delirious Love Letter to Romance is available now through Unbound.