I’m pretty sure these books corrupted me beyond repair. But there were three novels by Gary Jennings, and since those were historical fiction and the jacket flaps promised adventure, I read each one over the course of the summer. Most of the books within turned out to be age-inappropriate and not really attention grabbing (I ended up tossing most of them). Since no one else was interested, I bid a dollar without actually looking through the contents, and brought the box home the next day. One of the items was a big box of novels. In the seventh grade, there was a silent auction at my elementary school for students, but parents could bring in the material.

There’s a story behind exactly how I came about reading these books. Yet the above passage tells you nearly everything you can expect from a Gary Jennings novel. Perhaps I’m just a bad person, but this scene left me giggling rather than horror-struck. This touching scene happens shortly after the headless body of the victim’s wife somehow manages to vomit out her baby.

Then the Hun tucked his knife away, lowered himself onto Fabius’s pinned-down body, thrust his fascinum into that slit and began pumping away as he would have done with a woman. The lecherous Hun so eager to violate him now took out a blade-no sword, just a belt knife-and carefully, almost delicately made a short incision in the optio’s belly skin, just above the crotch hair. To demonstrate my point, I will treat you to a brief excerpt from Raptor: You read them with a kind of horrified fascination, wondering just how far Gary Jennings will go. No, that’s not really why you read these novels. In the two and a half novels I’ve read, there’s only the vaguest ghost of a plot, and a slightly less-vague attempt at characterization that often just devolves into racial stereotypes. In the Jennings brand of historical fiction, the history only serves as a backdrop for some truly bizarre sexual escapades. Unless you’ve read Jennings, it’s hard to imagine how utterly depraved his novels are (and I don’t use that term lightly), or how unintentionally hilarious for how hard they try. It’s a dark, bile-filled corner of my heart, and a physician should probably remove it as soon as possible, but as long as it remains, I acknowledge that Gary Jennings (1928-1999) was the uncontested absolute grand master of the field. There’s a very special place in my heart for a little subgenre I like to call “historical-pornographic fiction”.

Aztec jennings