Fifty Shades Fatter - A Sequel (Fifty Shades of Neigh Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  Incidentally, she also has no frame of reference for penis size either, so take that as you will.

  But he does have a helicopter. That’s all I’m saying about that.

  Anyway, she goes to work and it turns out Jack has left the company rather suddenly. If you’re drinking or eating anything right now I suggest you swallow your mouthful before you read any further.

  Okay?

  Ana has been given his job.

  “Please, I know this is sudden, but you’ve already made contact with Jack’s key authors. Your chapter notes haven’t gone unnoticed by the other editors. You have a shrewd mind, Anastasia. We all think you can do it.”

  “Okay.” This is unreal.

  Behold, the MARK OF THE BEAST. Ye shall know it by its ways; it shall wax wondrous in the sight of minor characters even though yea, it is crap. Thou shalt not suffer this beast to live, for it is ABOMINATION. Upon its brows shall shine wreaths of glorious hair and its eyes shall beam all manner of marvellous colours and hues, but thou shalt recognise it in its foulness and call it by the name that is writ upon its flesh – MARY SUE.

  So, having been promoted to acting editor despite spending less than two weeks at the company and spending most of that time either crying, talking to her friends on the phone and e-mailing her boyfriend, guess what Ana does?

  Yeah. Admit it. You thought she was going to e-mail her boyfriend, didn’t you?

  Well she doesn’t. So there.

  In a stunning plot twist, she telephones him instead.

  By the way, if you were thinking Dickfacehead had anything to do with this stunning promotion then you would also be wrong. He swears he had nothing to do with it and we all know he’s an honest, forthright sort of chap who would never throw money at a problem or...pffft ha hahahahahha. Okay, no. He’s not.

  He gives her an engagement ring but she’s not allowed to open the box until Saturday, because we have to have some source of suspense now that we’ve effectively run out of plot and there’s still another quarter of a book to go.

  Anyway, they go to see Dr. Flynn, Dickfacehead’s psychiatrist. There are two possibilities here – either Flynn is the psychiatric version of Saul Goodman and operates out of a portakabin behind a titty bar or he is calmly listening to Dickfacehead’s issues, nodding along and making serious bank in the process. It’s probably option B, because his office is pretty pimp. Really pimp.

  Actually, due to a spot of two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language confusion, Dr. Flynn may very well be a pimp. His office is described as looking like a ‘gentleman’s club’, which to us Rightpondian types refers to the kind of clubs that sprung up in 18th Century London where men could go for a chop supper and a drink when they weren’t knocking out dirty novels, selling patent medicines, running high class sex-clinics and drawing filthy cartoons for the print shop. (18th Century London was very interesting, unlike this so-called dirty book.) The clubs survived to the present day, and are still thought of as wood-panelled, wing-armchaired hangouts for men of a certain age, weight and peerage, which is presumably what E.L. means when she says it looks like a ‘gentleman’s club’.

  Of course, in America a gentleman’s club is rather more...Bada Bing. So American readers are inevitably going to be left with the impression that Dr. Flynn owns a titty bar.

  Ana, alone with Dr. Flynn, explains that she’s never been in a relationship before and Flynn tells her that in the time she’s known Dickfacehead he’s made more progress than he has in the past two years.

  Oh, and apparently Dickfacehead is not a sadist and Ana shouldn’t worry about that side of him. And that “he’s not insane”. Yeah. Someone’s been making it rain in Dr. Flynn’s gentleman’s club, haven’t they? This guy must be shitting in solid gold toilets.

  “In a nutshell, he’s not a sadist, Ana. He’s an angry, frightened, brilliant young man, who was dealt a shit hand of cards when he was born...”

  And then he was adopted by a filthy rich couple and suffered miserably – summers in Europe, a pony for each day of the week, operas at La Scala, champagne suppers in Paris, skiing in Aspen. That poor, poor man. I admit, he was also sexually abused, but nobody seems to want to mention that.

  “Emotionally, Christian is an adolescent, Ana.” So you, Ana, inexperienced little twit that you are, should absolutely dive head first into a relationship with a giant emotionally unstable manchild. Also I think the doctor is being a bit generous – Christian’s catatonic fit reminded me a bit of that thing toddlers do when they don’t want to go somewhere, when they let their legs go limp and flop on the floor like a landed fish. Usually happens in the cake aisle at Tesco, suspiciously close to the Cadbury’s Mini-Rolls.

  So, yeah – Dr. Flynn is a terrible doctor, because a good one wouldn’t advise these rancid little psychos to spend another minute in one another’s company, given that they are addicted to their own moronic, neverending psychodrama. That or he’s a minor character and we all know what happens to minor characters when Mary Sue swings by. Let’s face it, he’s already noted the magical power of her Healing VaginaTM.

  Ana goes to meet José and invites him to stay at Christian’s place. That should be nice and awkward then. It was just as well – I mean, let’s face it, they were running out of things to whine about, so José should fit the bill nicely.

  Then Ana drives her car like a big girl while Dickfacehead gives her directions. (I’m terribly sorry – I realise I just called him Christian in the last two paragraphs, when his name is Dickfacehead.) Dickfacehead talks about his previous experience with therapy.

  “Baby, I’ve been subjected to them all. Cognitivism, Freud, functionalism, Gestalt, behaviourism...You name it, over the years I’ve done it,” he says and his tone betrays his bitterness.

  Well, you know – psychiatry can achieve a lot of things but so far I don’t think it’s ever claimed a cure for Being An Asshole. Also Freud? Is it 1929 in here or is it just me? Psychiatry has moved on quite a bit since Papa Sigmund.

  Anyway, they arrive in a chintzy neighbourhood Ana doesn’t recognise and there the chapter ends. God damn this book is awful.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ...begins with this sentence.

  Christian continues to drive past single-story, well-kept clapboard houses where kids play basketball in their yards or cycle and run around in the street.

  I know it’s been said before, but E.L. James is a horrible writer. Transcribing her mangled sentences is a strange experience, largely because there’s never a comma where you expect one.

  They drive past this –

  Grass and wildflowers have reclaimed it, creating a rural idyll – a meadow, where the late evening breeze softly ripples through the glass and the late evening sun gilds the wildflowers. It’s lovely, utterly tranquil, and suddenly I imagine myself lying in the grass and gazing up at a clear blue summer sky. The thought is tantalising, yet makes me feel homesick for some reason. How odd.

  Hurrr you guys she’s Bella and it’s the meadow from Twilight you guys – aren’t I clever?

  No. It’s not big and it’s not clever – now go and sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done. Incidentally, before we dive any deeper into these final five chapters of soggy prose, continuity errors and sheer pants-on-head foolery, it’s worth mentioning that the main reason why Ana and Christian are such horrible, static, self-centred characters is because they are Bella and Edward from Twilight.

  Their names and eye-colours have been changed but to all intents and purposes they are still Soggyknickers and the Disco Ball. Even their speech patterns have been carried across; Ana is breathy, run-on and prone to thesaurus abuse, while twenty-seven year old Dickfacehead sounds like a boring Mormon vampire whose speech patterns haven’t altered since he coughed off his mortal coil back in 1918.

  The legal blah blah at the start of these books is probably the funniest thing about them. The publisher claims that Fifty Shades of Grey was previously serialised online ‘with dif
ferent characters’ under the name Master of the Universe. This is, of course, absolute cockrot. A comparison of the two texts showed them to be something like 85% identical, with much of that 15% accounting for name changes. These are not ‘different characters’. She’s still an unconvincing bookworm and an even less convincing klutz and he’s still a stalker, a prissy-pants bore and the least fun thing to ever glitter in public.

  Anyway, back in the happy land of Chapter Eighteen, Edward takes Bella to an ‘an impressive Mediterranean-style house of soft pink sandstone,’ and she puts her ears back the second she discovers there is a woman in the empty house.

  She smiles at me and holds out her hand, which I shake. Her isn’t-he-dreamily-gorgeous-wish-he-were-mine flush does not go unnoticed.

  Don’t you just hate her?

  The lady is an estate agent and Dickfacehead wants to buy the house so that he and Ana can live there after they’re married. No pressure, darling.

  And there’s plenty of room for kids, but again no pressure. Also there’s a paddock and stable and Ana clutches her pearls at the thought and oh so facetiously describes horses as ‘four-legged fiend[s] of Satan.’ Figures a yahoo like Ana wouldn’t get along with horses. If there’s one thing some horses really hate, it’s not being the twitchiest thing in the paddock.

  Then they go back to Seattle and he takes her to a restaurant called The Mile High Club, where they have champagne and oysters and Ana eats asparagus all sexy and takes off her panties. He says he’s going to make her wait for sex in what, again, I suspect is some kind of delayed gratification scenario but is actually just boring. This is the kind of thing we have to rely on for dramatic tension now that Leila is picking out new straightjackets and Jack has disappeared.

  Also nobody seems to be worried about Jack’s attempted rape/blackmail threat or his subsequent disappearance. And nobody’s called the police.

  Everyone in this book is a moron.

  Then Dickfacehead fingers Miss Mope in a crowded elevator and everyone in the elevator suddenly wonders why it smells like sea bass in here. Okay, no, they don’t, but judging by the state of this book at this point if they did turn around and find him wrist deep in her tunnel of love then everyone would sigh enviously and wish they too could find a love so pure and fisty.

  Then they make it a mission to fuck on every available surface of the apartment and Mrs. Jones the housekeeper is going to be so thrilled to be cleaning sweaty bottom-prints and bodily fluids off the glass-topped tables. I hope she pees in his coffee-maker.

  The next day Ana goes and snoops in Dickfacehead’s closet and finds photos of his previous subs, which he keeps in a shoebox in case this book should ever need a third unsatisfying blackmail storyline. Ana really has an unholy knack for making herself miserable, doesn’t she? Then she goes to ‘work’ and we all know what that means, don’t we?

  YES, IT’S TIME FOR E-MAILIES AGAIN!

  Ugh. He signs himself – ‘Christian Grey. Priapic CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc,’ causing Ana to ‘wonder idly what the female equivalent might be?’

  You. Next question.

  While we’re on the subject, Ana must be the only woman in the world who can have rough sex three or four times a day without getting a UTI.

  Then she says she has a surprise from his birthday and he e-mails to say ‘I hate it when you keep things from me’ and starts sulking. Also it’s nice to see that Ana has taken to her new job as the busy acting editor of a publishing house. Maybe they just told her she was editor to keep the new boss (Dickfacehead, of course) quiet and are running things properly behind Ana’s back. In fact they probably told Ana that the editor’s job is to e-mail her boyfriend all day, take two hour lunches and play Minesweeper until carpal tunnel sets in. It’s just better for the company that way.

  THEN HE DOESN’T E-MAIL HER BACK AND SHE STARTS TO FREAK OUT YOU GUYS OH MY GOD WHERE IS HE?

  I don’t know. Maybe he’s doing that thing that people do on weekdays. You know. Work.

  Then Kate is back from Barbados and she joins Ana and José for a drink, because everyone in this book drinks like a pissed fish even though they never, ever pee.

  And then we find out that Dickfacehead went up in his helicopter and it crashed.

  This is my favourite chapter of the whole book.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dickfacehead is dead. The End. Oh wait – he’s only ‘missing’ and being as it’s only about eight in the evening and the last time he e-mailed Ana was less than twelve hours ago, he might just be late at the office.

  Like I say, because we’ve run out of plot we have to wring tension out of anything we can get our hands on. Brace yourself for something even more stupid than Dickfacehead’s catatonic shitfit.

  HIS HELICOPTER IS MISSING! IT’S SO DRAMATIC!

  I stare at the flames, mesmerised. They dance and weave bright blazing orange with tips of cobalt blue in the fireplace at Christian’s apartment.

  Jesus. What a sentence. Literally a mental Technicolor yawn.

  It’s still June, by the way, but Ana is ‘cold. Bone chillingly cold.’ It’s a metaphor for how all the warmth has gone out her life, because she hasn’t seen Dickfacehead since breakfast, and he may very well be dead.

  My thoughts turn to the house we saw yesterday and the huge fireplaces – real fireplaces for burning wood. I’d like to make love with Christian in front of a real fire. I’d like to make love with Christian in front of this fire. Yes, that would be fun.

  I love how when he’s apparently dead the first thing she thinks to miss about him is sex.

  Mia sits across from me on the larger-than-large u-shaped couch, holding hands with Grace. They gaze at me, pain and anxiety etched on their lovely faces. Grace looks older – a mother worried for her son. I blink dispassionately at them. I can’t offer a reassuring smile, a tear even – there’s nothing, just blankness and the growing emptiness.

  That’s probably because you are a terrible, hollow person and absolutely dead inside. Just saying.

  Seriously – I think she just out-Bella’d Miss Swan. What an astoundingly unpleasant young woman.

  Anyway, she wallows in her own picturesque pain like a pig in stink for a couple more pages, then it turns out Dickfacehead wasn’t dead after all and he walks unhurt and alive back into the apartment. Yes, there was a helicopter crash and he was presumed dead for less than eight hours and five whole pages. Holy shit.

  Dramatic tension – how not to do it.

  According to Dickfacehead he was flying back with Ros, his ‘number two’. And yes, Ros is short for Rosalind. We later find out that Ros is twice as fabulous as Liberace’s favourite candelabra, which is why this time Ana felt free to worry that Dickfacehead was only dead and not (horrors) bumping uglies with another woman. There was a fire in the helicopter – both engines – and they managed to land safely.

  Daddy Dickfacehead, AKA Carrick AKA T.T. Big Daddy Pumpington queries this, since there are supposed to be safety features in place that mean both engines couldn’t catch fire. So either Dickfacehead is flying the helicopter version of the RMS Titanic or there is a plot point afoot.

  T.T. Big Daddy Pumpington stands around saying things like ‘Both engines?’ and ‘Electrical failure...that’s odd, isn’t it?’ but Dickfacehead and Ana are busy ignoring him and admiring one another. I think at one point he takes out a set of semaphore flags and signals PLOT POINT but everyone is too busy smugging it up about how great it is that Dickfacehead isn’t dead.

  Yes, everything’s super. It’s not like there’s a disgruntled former editor/part time rapist and blackmailer out there. And it’s not like he’s nursing a Japanese horror movie sized grudge against our hero and heroine.

  People this dense deserve everything they get.

  Then Ana gives him his birthday present, which is a plastic keychain (I know. She really made an effort) and it has an LED display that lights up and says YES, which means she is not only a horrible person but also certi
fiably too stupid to live.

  Chapter Twenty

  She’s going to marry him, he’s not dead and this can only mean one thing – yes, it is most definitely FUCK O’CLOCK.

  I love him so much, and I’m suddenly overcome by the enormity of my love and the depth of my commitment to him. I will spend the rest of my life loving this man, and with that awe-inspiring thought, I detonate around him – a healing, cathartic orgasm, crying out his name as tears flow down my cheeks.

  Ana is literally so narcissistic she can make herself orgasm and weep simultaneously, simply by thinking about how great she is. Honestly – I don’t even remember Bella Miseryguts Swan being this fucking horrible.

  Then it’s more smuggery about how much they love each other and how they’re so deep and special and amazing and blah blah blah. Luckily I don’t really have to summarise this because it has even less substance than the usual bleatings that pass for conversation in their awful little world.

  She talks for a bit to José about how great Dickfacehead is and then gives him his ‘other’ birthday present, which is this...