Fucking Day: 1,001 Las Vegas Nights

Sometimes when people don't like something, they say, "this is a crime," but a fun fact about 1,001 Las Vegas Nights is that it is both terrible and quite literally a crime! The writer Angelique St. Chase Jr., aka Andjelika Martin, stole $400,000 from her job as a Casino marketing manager to promote this book.

She didn't steal actual cash. She took money allocated to purchase Google Adwords for the casino and instead bought phrases like "Shades of Gray 50," and attached them to her erotic novel about a woman with magic color-changing eyes, who sleeps only four to five hours a night, has ten vaginal orgasms whenever she has sex and has been proposed to by every man she's ever dated (it's based on her real life, of course).

The two things Andjelika Martin really wants you to know about her book are that this is all real sex she has had because she is very hot, and also she is the cover model for the book. She wants you to know the cover model thing so bad she mentions it in her author bio...

... and in a special section on the last page of the book called COVER MODEL.

I don't know why she felt the need to clarify that she is "the person wearing the wrong size shirt." Either she was worried that we would mistake her for a glass full of dice, or more likely, she thought anyone looking at the cover wouldn't believe a woman that attractive could write. Surely this author must be pulling one over on us. She's probably the one holding the dice glass or something, and she's trying to trick us into thinking she is this book cover booby goddess.

Andjelika thinks she's playing 5D chess every day. She's so much smarter than everyone around her that even the most minute of details must be explained to death. For instance, in the back of the book, under a section titled "Truth Vs. Fiction," she says, "most everything in this book has double and triple meanings, and there is a reason for pretty much everything." Having a reason for everything in your book is pretty standard, but ok, go on.

"For example, Pandora has the last name, Richardson, so her initials would be P.R. since her job is in marketing. Scott's last name is Himmel, which is German for Heaven since his job as a psychiatrist is the equivalent of being a sin-eater." So great job, "Andjelika." That's one fact a high school sophomore writing a highly inappropriate book report on this thing would notice, and one connection no one else on earth would make. It'd be like Sylvester Stallone proudly explaining how Rocky could also mean jagged and barren like the natural habitat of the animals in his wife's pet store.

This woman claims to speak seven languages but can't make her characters sound normal to save her life. A lot of the book is emails several pages long between characters, and the male protagonist inexplicably adds………between words, which had the effect of making me read all of his emails in a William Shatner voice.

I…….hated this………method of communication……and I strongly suspect……… .it's designed to make the novel seem longer than it is……..but thank God it wasn't any.......longer.

Beyond this inexplicable habit of the male protagonist, there's also the fact that all of the characters rarely use any contractions, so it's like reading a Star Trek fanfic where Data fucks another version of Data from a different timeline. (note to self write that fanfic).

I am going to cum, is just so formal. It sounds like you're beginning a written invitation to your orgasm.

But the character can't say I'm going to cum because that is not.......how smart people talk! Smart people say things like, "I have had many men fall in love with me since then. It has not changed anything." Anyone who says I've or hasn't is a friggin dummy, as we all know.

So, we're almost halfway into this article, and I haven't told you the book's plot, which I feel no shame for because there's not much of it, and it doesn't matter. Basically, Las Vegas PR executive Pandora Richardson (I don't know if you caught this, but her job is P.R. and her initials are PR. I'm the smartest woman on Earth). Pandora Richardson is trying to get over a relationship where she keeps saying she was catfished by the guy she was online dating, but really he was exactly who he said he was, except that he was married.

To get over Ken the catfisher, she starts dating a therapist named Scott, who gets off on "analyzing" her relationship with Ken by reading their old, terrible…….emails. It turns out Scott and Ken had a prior relationship and Scott, Ken, and Pandora all end up having a threesome, Pandora cums 100 times and then has an orgasm so intense she literally passes out.

If I were going to title this book, I would call it "Compliments for Pandora" because that's mostly what the book is. "'I have to admit I am still a bit stunned as to why a successful, independent, beautiful, single woman winds up online looking for a Friend-With-Benefits,' he said as he sliced a piece of cheese and put it confidently on a water cracker," is an actual quote from this book. Now I'm worried that I have a low confidence cheese spreading technique, and everyone judges me for it. Look at her; she's so uncertain about that cheese! They're probably laughing to themselves as I apply too much pressure, and my cracker splits right in two. Fuck!

Do people usually sit down and go over their threesome using the same language as you would for a quarterly review at work? "Speaking for myself, I think the numbers are great this session. Orgasms are up. I can agree with Ken that overall time spent humping is down. This was a successful interaction. There are bagels in the conference room. Let's call it a night."

Ken compliments Pandora. Scott compliments Pandora. Hell, even Pandora compliments Pandora.

I get what she's going for here. She's trying to create an aspirational character. Pandora is gorgeous and so cool that everyone can't help but tell her how smart and beautiful she is all the time. The problem is that these aspirational characters usually have some kind of internal turmoil they're dealing with that makes them interesting. They don't tend to just agree they are as great as everyone thinks they are.

That's why so many gorgeous heroines are clumsy. They need to be flawed because perfect people are boring and unrelatable, but their flaw needs to be minor, and clumsiness is cute. Pandora's biggest flaw is like, "Oh no, my breasts are TOO luscious. I'm TOO good at sex. I orgasm so easily that I'm not allowed at mall food courts anymore."

When Pandora isn't getting complimented, she's having sex, and the descriptions of sex in this book are, HOO BOY. Interesting? C…creative? I try to keep an open mind because different people find different things sexy, and that being said, there's a passage from this book about Scott’s octo-balls that made me laugh harder than I ever had in my entire life.

It's not uncommon for erotic novels to describe sex in ways that are not at all sexy, but Andjelika Martin has a real talent for making it not just unsexy but also weird. Penises are often called "torture devices," her vagina is, "her wet opening," which is slightly better than a moist opening but I still don’t like it.

"Scott's mind was quickly sketching out the details of his plan as his hand reached for his security blanket, her breast," is a sentence that happens. As a rule, I try not to compare breasts to beloved childhood objects.

I can't stress enough how poorly this project ended for the author. Yes, she spent a year in prison and was forced to pay restitution for the money she stole, but also, after infusing $400,000 into marketing this monstrosity, it did not sell at all. She did an interview (now scrubbed from the Internet) with the Las Vegas Sun where she claimed to have broken Amazon's top 500 romance novels, but so did Magical Midlife Love: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Novel (Leveling Up Book 4), and I bet its author didn't spend $400,000 promoting it or go to prison.

1,001 Las Vegas Nights only has 33 ratings on Goodreads and 37 Amazon ratings which can pretty much be summed up as either, "This is trash :D" or, "This is trash >:0". It may be the most agreed upon book on earth.

Romance is the most popular genre of book, and a publisher once told me that the average romance reader reads around 50 books per year. It's the easiest genre to get a hit in, and even after a (super duper stolen) cash infusion of more money than a major publishing house would put toward most projects, it still sucked so bad that even 100 regular people wouldn't read it!

But I read it. In fact, I read it twice, once for a podcast four years ago that never got made, and again to write this article. I guess this makes me……..Angelique St. Chase, Jr.'s number one fan. Oh no.

You can follow Lydia on Twitter unless her recently hired life coach tells her twitter is bad.