Fifty Shades Later: An Inevitable Conclusion (Fifty Shades of Neigh Book 3)

by Anna Roberts

  I sit up, take the popsicle from Ted, and quickly slip it into my mouth, licking off the excess juice. Hmm...cranberry, cool and delicious.

  “Mine!” Ted protests, his voice ringing with indignation.

  Well, there goes any lingering doubt as to the brat’s paternity. Interestingly, although the little shit is already well-acquainted with the words ‘mine’ and ‘no’, his doting parents appear to be doing nothing to bring him up to speed on ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. If you ever needed any further proof that Ana and Christian are total assholes.

  Sophie takes Damien off for a walk and Christian once again tries to persuade Ana to give up work, causing Ana to break out the clumsy exposition.

  “Grey Publishing has an author on the New York Times bestseller’s list – Boyce Fox’s sales are phenomenal, the e-book side of our business has exploded, and I finally have the team I want around me.”

  “And you’re making money in these difficult times,” Christian adds, his voice reflecting his pride. “But...I like you barefoot and pregnant and in my kitchen.”

  I lean back so I can see his face. He gazes down at me, eyes bright.

  “I like that, too,” I murmur, and he kisses me, his hands still spread across my bump.

  The bestselling novel of 2012. Go back almost one hundred years to 1918 and E.M. Hull’s infamous The Sheik played out pretty much just like this. Except that one contained even more rape. We’ve come a long way, ladies. (I’m so depressed.)

  Then Christian says he’s not going to name the new baby after his mother. I don’t know why not – she’d stand out in a crowd. All the others would be trendy little Rubys and Ivys and Avas and then there’d be CrackWhore Grey.

  Meanwhile the kid has dropped his popsicle on the grass and now he’s crying. And then the book gets creepy again.

  I take his hand and kiss his sticky fingers.

  “I can taste your popsicle here on your fingers.”

  Ted stops crying and examines his hand.

  “Put your fingers in your mouth.”

  Given that every other sex scene (from the very beginning) involved Christian sticking his fingers up Ana’s muff and forcing her to ‘taste herself’, the parallels here are all kinds of disgusting.

  “I think Daddy wants to taste popsicle, too,” I whisper in Ted’s little ear. Ted frowns at me, then looks at his hand and holds it out to Christian. Christian smiles and puts Ted’s fingers in his mouth.

  “Hmm...tasty.”

  There’s no way to explain exactly how gross this is without me telling you about popsicles and Twihards. It’s kind of a running joke in the community that since Edward Cullen is icy cold to the touch, his sparkly vampire boner must feel like getting down and grinding on a popsicle. Some enterprising sex-toy manufacturers even made a sparkly dildo and suggested that owners keep it in the freezer for the full icy Edward Cullen experience.

  See? I told you it was terrible.

  Then we have another pointless flashback in which Ana gives birth, because we couldn’t have surmised that had happened on account of the toddler currently calling her ‘Mommy’. She had a c-section, apparently. And the kid’s full name is Theodore Raymond Grey, which I suppose is better than Rayrick or Carmond.

  “What is it?” Christian tilts my chin back.

  “I was just remembering Ted’s birth.”

  Christian blanches and cups my belly. “I am not going through that again. Elective caesarean this time.”

  Yeah. Gotta keep that cooch nice and tight for your angry little weenie, right Christian? Really. It’s amazing. Every time I think this man can’t get any more repellent, he goes and outdoes himself. Is it any wonder I had a hard time making Crispian Neigh more repulsive than the (sort of) original model? Short of making him an actual Nazi I don’t think I could have done much more.

  By the way, if you wondering what happened to her good friend José, too bad. He doesn’t get a future, because he’s not rich, white or married to one of Christian’s creepy family. But he is coming to a party for the brat king child, where hopefully he won’t spoil it by falling madly in love with Ana’s nymphomaniac foetus. Everyone will also be crossing their fingers extra tight and hoping the nanny doesn’t appear on the rooftop with a noose around her neck and start screaming “It’s all for you, Theodore! It’s all for you!”

  Ray and José will be coming and all the Greys, including Ted’s new cousin Ava, Kate and Elliot’s two month old daughter. I look forward to catching up with Kate and seeing how motherhood is agreeing with her.

  Remember how Kate was going to have a career as a journalist? Remember that? Well, no more. She’s not even twenty-five and she’s already pooping out babies for the Cult of Grey, because that’s every woman’s dream, after all. To marry a man and have his babies. All of us who decided not to have kids or gave priority to our careers instead, those of us who would prefer to marry women, or any of us who listened to our grandmothers when they said ‘Your life doesn’t have to be like mine was’, well, we can just go cry into our pie like the sad, bitter rejects we are, because we will never know joy like Ana’s.

  I’m heartbroken. I don’t know about you.

  And then they exchange I love yous and the book ends. Finally.

  Oh wait.

  It doesn’t.

  The author has shat a pile of Christian Grey fanfiction in the end of the book. Fifty’s First Christmas. Oh dear. I thought this was going to be some kind of hot mess with mistletoe cockrings and Santa-themed flagellation, but it turns out it’s just drivel about Christian when he was a poor neglected child.

  My sweater is scratchy and smells of new. Everything is new. I have a new mommy. She is a doctor. She has a tetscope that I can stick in my ears and hear my heart. She is kind and smiles.

  Yeah. I think that’s about as much of that as anyone can stand without vomiting themselves inside out.

  The other thing at the back of the book is tantamount to a written threat to write the whole hideous trilogy again from Christian Grey’s point of view, a la Stephenie Meyer’s thankfully aborted Midnight Sun. Should this ever happen it will probably end literature forever, or cause some kind of mass suicides like in that awful M. Night Shyamalan movie with the trees and the world’s worst science teacher. It’s just as well it’s neither important or interesting, as right now I don’t have the mental resources to even attempt to recap it.

  So. What can I say about Fifty Shades Freed, in summing up? I could say that it was the worst book I have ever had the misfortune to read. I could say that it was a pointless and astonishingly moronic insight into the plastic minds of two of the most charmless characters ever to be stolen wholesale from the pages of someone else’s lousy novel. Unfortunately, if I said these things I wouldn’t be doing justice to the shallowness, tedium and sheer intellectual and spiritual poverty of this dumb, squalid bumwipe of a book.

  Attempting to point out the problems with this book would take forever, since absolutely nothing is done the way it should be. Pace, character, plot, dialogue, flow – everything is just wrong. You know the old story pyramid from creative writing classes? Inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution? If this book were represented as a line graph it would trundle along as a long, flat line followed by a sad, lacklustre spasm at the end – sort of like a bored, half-hearted wank when the vibrator batteries have almost run out. A fitting description, really, considering these books were originally written for the grisly purposes of Twihard masturbation.

  And this is perhaps the saddest thing of all – the knowledge that these dire, tiresome books represent someone’s wildest wish-fulfilment. This is a series of books about a young woman initially settling for a man who doesn’t really fulfil any of her sexual and emotional desires all that well, but – through her determination to cling to him like the stubbornest of dingleberries – eventually ends up with a man who is just slightly less repellent than the hideous failure of a human being he was when she firs
t met him.

  When you remove the money, the helicopter, the private yacht, the diamond studded buttplugs and billion dollar bank account, this is the bare, naked fantasy at the heart of the Fifty Shades Trilogy.

  Yeah.

  Fantasy’s not really your strong suit, is it Ms. James?

  Links

  You have been reading a silly parody of a silly book, but there is a sobering side to the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy.

  Numerous critics have pointed out the abusive nature of the relationship contained within these bestselling books. Most of them managed to do so without saying 'fuck' nearly as much as me.

  Without wanting to get too heavy, here are just a few of the resources that are out there for anyone who is in a relationship with a real life Christian Grey.

  National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (US)

  National Domestic Violence Hotline (US)

  NO MORE

  This Is Abuse (UK)

  Women's Aid UK

  DVMen (While most victims of domestic violence are women, this British organisation focuses on the male victims of domestic abuse.)

  All of these websites contain information to help you cover your tracks should anyone be checking up on your browsing history.

  Also available on Amazon.com

  A Box Full of Ashes

  Eliot & O'Hare #1

  Three misfits, three smoke breaks and one series of extraordinary events.

  An angel appears on Brighton beach, a hospital patient bursts into flames in Plymouth and a goth spontaneously combusts in a churchyard in Sidmouth; it’s all in a day’s work for stage magician and freelance paranormal investigator Francis Eliot. For pathologist Camilla O’Hare it’s nothing short of lunacy, particularly when one of the victims’ bodies disappears from the morgue in the length of time it takes her to answer the phone.

  When the two of them join forces to figure out what’s really going on behind the sudden rash of spontaneous human combustions taking the West Country by storm, neither can predict just how weird things are about to get. A missing cat, a dog-eared copy of Dracula, a guitar case full of garlic and a priest so turbulent that even Henry II’s drunken knights would think twice – all add up to a hypothesis so extravagantly nuts that nobody wants to come out and say the V-word.

  Except at some point you’re going to have to admit the obvious. Especially when the obvious keeps trying to eat you.

  This fast-paced British urban fantasy is the first in a brand new series that will delight fans of Bram Stoker, Jonathan Creek and anyone who was ever sceptical about the idea of sparkling vampires.

  Amazon.com