Picture this; you're waiting for someone in their car while they take care of some business. You look around bored and happen to see a Christian lovestory book on the backseat. The writing is predictable but not too bad, and the heroine is a virgin, hero, handsome cowboy that he is, is not but is of good honest stock.You're humming along not too shabby when you come to this scene. The hero is talking about his parents' death during a cattle drive.
He remembers that the ground shook like an earthquake and the cattle went wild. A pack of bobcats was attacking and bringing down the calves. His mom grabbed her gun and slipped to the ground bringing down several of those rampaging bobcats. The cattle veered toward his mother and knowing it was already too late, his father swept off his horse and covered his beloved's body. They were buried there on the prairie.
For some reason, the magic was gone, and I just couldn't finish the book.
Why are you snooping through your friend's car?
He was running errands, Did you think I was crawling over seats and pulling out my magnifying glass? We discussed the book when he returned, it belongs to his 13-year-old, and his ex-wife only allows her Christian romances.
We agreed that it was probably the only ones that the family saw and or knew about, and he said his daughter knew his sister, not her mother, was available for all the teen angst she might need help with.
A pack of wild bobcats? Seriously? A pack of bobcats bringing down calves? Why not a pack of frenzied foxes tearing his parents apart? Maybe a heard of crazed prairie dogs trampling the heard into the prairie?
I liked the part about the earth shaking like a quake myself!
I owned a used and new bookstore for many years. The dirty little secret is that almost all of these books are formula driven with a standard plot and interchangeable characters, places, and events. Someone told me computers were doing some of the writing on the pulp romance novels. I could probably write one, they are so simplistic.
Far-fetched, but many action adventure books would not pass the Mythbusters test.
My father had a subscription to a magazine called True something. It had the most ghastly bear attack stories! I used to wait each month for it to come so I could read the next adventure. Evidently, I was quite bloodthirsty back in the day!
@pixiedust we might be related! I had a Missourian aunt who spent a good part of her life writing for True Confessions and always used their formula. I always thought it hilarious that a hard living, smoker/drinker wrote moralistic stories for a living!
I tried looking up on Google, my dad's magazine from the fifties, but without a title, I couldn't find much.
LOL! Hilarious! Pack of bobcats attacking CATTLE, in the WEST. I hope that book was meant as a joke.
But even back when I was going along with Christianity, by default, I refused to read Christian books, turned down religious books offered me, gave away any given to me as gifts.
I said, even then, that religious books are typically of inferior quality; no editing, clumsy writing, simplistic, full of cliches and ridiculous premises, while obviously trying to proselytize, condemn, or frighten people.
A pack of bobcats? Really? That's absurd and asinine.