There have been very few bright moments following Britain’s disastrous decision to leave the European Union in last week’s Brexit referendum. But one of the few — and one of the funniest — comes to us courtesy of our old friend, satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle.
The book's real, the review's real and I've finally found something to laugh about in this whole terrible mess. pic.twitter.com/5r8yF9Fa2l
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 26, 2016
Fresh from saving science fiction’s Hugo Awards, Tingle, whose badly written "turn-everything-gay" cultural spoofs have given him a huge cult following, has turned his attention toward the plight of Britain. His new book, Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, turns the UK into a dystopian nightmare where only the strong — and the queer — survive:
When Alex learns that Britain has decided to leave the European Union, he’s shocked by just hold [sic] normal everything seems. But the calm doesn’t last as Alex is suddenly accosted by a giant living coin from the not so distant future.
In this horrific future where Britain has left the EU, four story busses lie strewn about the streets of London after a failed plan to cut costs, the Queen’s Guard have been replaced by flying reptiles with machine guns and the River Thames runs red with molten lava.
Now Alex and his handsome sentient pound must travel back to the past and sway the vote for European solidarity, by proving that all you need is love.
This erotic tale is 4,200 words of sizzling human on monetary unit action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, cream pies and living pound love.
The book, which is currently the No. 1 best-seller under the erotica "horror" category, opens with our hero, Alex, awaking hungover the day after the Brexit vote. Alex is surprised that everything seems so normal — until he’s visited by a giant floating sentient coin named Perber, who takes him one month into the future to show him a Britain beset by chaos. Oh, and giant flying machine gun-wielding lizard-bat hybrids.
Perber explains to Alex that in the grim future of July 2016, everyone in the UK is a floating sentient coin. The value of the British pound drops so low that "we had to make up for it by becoming coins ourselves."
Perber needs Alex to go back in time and warn Britain not to vote to exit the EU; but because of plot magic the only way Perber can propel himself and Alex backward through the space-time continuum is for the two of them to have a rousing round of gay sex.
Sure, this may be a ridiculous plot point, but given that it still makes more sense than millions of British citizens Googling "what is the EU?" a day after voting to leave the EU, we’ll allow it.
Just as a side note, we should mention that fans of Tingle’s typical semi-incoherent writing style may be disappointed that Pounded by the Pound, perhaps in deference to the gravity of the situation, is written straightforwardly and, er, fluently, like every other erotic novel where a guy gets pounded by a sentient coin. It also contains the lines "Pound me, pound!" and "I want you to fuck me ... just like we’ve all fucked ourselves with this vote!" (It also contains a small bonus story, "Monday Pounds Me in the Butt," because when doesn’t Monday pound us in the butt?)
Although Pounded by the Pound is listed under horror, it ends on a typically Tinglian note of positivity: Alex and Perber are able to go back in time to convince Brits that all they need is love. In other words, all they need is to reject the coded rhetoric of underlying anti-immigrant and racist sentiments that fueled the Brexit campaign.
Alas, in real life, because we don’t have spacetime-transcending gay coins to assist us on our way, Brexit may not be that easy to step back from. But at least we’ll always have satire — and hopefully we’ll always have Chuck Tingle.
