I’m reading a mystery series right now that is both addictive and fails me as a reader. And it was put on hold after the fourth book in the series, so I’m pretty sure it failed other readers as well. And I’m pretty sure I know why:
Great idea, bad sub plot that then shares way too much information.
Some of you will recognize this series, but I’m not going to specifically call out the author here because that’s not the point of what I want to discuss.
So the novels are mysteries. The main character travels the country and investigates various disappearances. All good so far.
But she travels with her brother. (Well, as it turns out, not her actual blood-relative brother, but her stepbrother that she spent the last decade thinking of as her brother.) In book one there are enough overly-intimate moments between them that it’s pretty obvious they’re going to become a couple at some point in the books.
As a reader, not something I would seek out. (Although there was a very big erotic romance trend around stepbrother romances about five years ago, so obviously many readers would.) So not my cup of tea, but I was willing to let it happen in the background so I could read the mysteries because I liked the premise of the books.
And then I got to book three and they finally got together and that relationship took over the books. There were sex scenes in book one but they were either alluded to without giving details or taken care of in a paragraph or two.
This time…
The author included more than one very detailed sex scene of the two of them together, one of which included the main character comparing the shape and size of her “brother’s” privates to those of other men she’s been with.
Ew. (It did not help that the main character continues to think of her new lover as her brother on a regular basis.)
But really. Any shift like that, without the relationship between the two to complicate it further, would be off-putting to a number of readers. You thought you were reading a gritty mystery and now you’re reading erotica.
I think this series highlights an issue many writers face when writing first-person novels. Because there’s no doubt that in new relationships that are sexual that the level of thought someone gives to sex and the amount of sex that happens become pretty central to that person.
So if you were really living in someone’s head there would be a lot of mental space given to sex and thinking about sex.
But it doesn’t have to make it onto the page. A novel is not a detailed accounting of every single thought a character has or of every single thing they do in a given day. That would make it incredibly long, incredibly boring, and provide way too much information about the character’s life.
As a novelist you have to pick and choose what you show to tell the type of story you’re trying to tell.
(By the way, book four was even worse. I had to start skimming. One because there were still these I-did-not-need-to-know-that sex scenes but also because the novel made the reader sit through the reactions of three sets of family members to this new-found forbidden love. Completely irrelevant to the plot, whatever the plot of this one actually is. I’m halfway through and still not sure at this point.)
This is a trade-published book so you’d think they’d have caught this issue. But no. The editor failed the author in this case, IMO.
So, to turn this from rant to writing advice…For all the authors out there, ask yourself, “Does this really need to be here? And does it need to be here in that level of detail? Am I keeping a focus on the story I’m actually supposed to be telling?”
(Especially when you take a left-turn from genre expectations like this one did.)
M.L. Humphrey 
Given when the “viscerality” first appeared, I wonder if the publishers actively sought to have it there: someone selling a series to a publisher would have the first book plotted out (if not written) and a reasonable idea for the second, so the third book is the point that the marketing team’s vision for where the series would go in the long term would start to come through; thus, as you say the relationship was there, potentially the biggest demographic the publishers identified for the start of the series was “readers who want the pseudo-incestuous romance to escalate” so that’s what they suggested (or “suggested”) would be a good direction to take.
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Good point. This particular author had another series turned into a tv series around the same time that was very graphic so they may have been encouraged to push things in that direction. Or at least not discouraged when they did so.
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