I stopped reading Piers Anthony when I was about 15 because he started making me feel really uncomfortable. He's the only author who I turned against so violently that I immediately went and sold all the copies I owned of his books--probably 8 or so Xanth books at the time. One too many glimpses of panties, I think. I just felt creeped out.

But I didn't know all this: [link]

That's just gross. I'm really glad I didn't get past Xanth. Really quite glad.

Ugh, so gross.

Amazon has the one-volume Lord of the Rings available in Kindle format for just under half price ($9.99 instead of $20.00) - [link]

Whoa. Disgusting. I had no idea.

I have only read Incarnations of Immortality and that weird book that took place on another planet with silicone-based life forms. None of this pinged me in IoI, but I haven't read those books in 30 years.

I am right and truly disgusted now though.

I did stop reading him because his stuff started to seem kind of creepy, but I had no idea it got that explicitly bad. Ick.

I stopped reading him because I met him and he was severely creepy, and friends had stories of more creepiness. He seems to live in his own self-righteous world of creepy.

I can give two examples of creepy from some of his popular work. Somewhere in the Xanth series, a kid agrees to help the evil magician kill a large number of people, because the kid's parents had promised he would do so. A fan wrote into Anthony to point out that the kid could simply choose not to help with the mass murder that not helping to kill large number of people would have been much more honorable than keeping a promise, especially since it was not the kid's promise. And Anthony blew his top. He told the fan that a Father's promise was binding on the son, and that for a son to break Father's promise was civil disobedience(!) and that only a son who was of age can rightfully commit civil disobedience. (Talk about supporting Patriarchy - this is literal support for Patriarchy). Plus the whole idea that promise breaking is worse than mass murder ... And to top it off he told the fan that the fan had no concept of what honor meant and that the character who was about to aid and abet mass murder was far more honorable than the fan would ever have any concept of being. And apparently Anthony was so proud of this exchange that he included it at the end of one of he Xanth books - presumably as a moral lesson for his readers.

Also in another book "Battle Circle" the viewpoint character and a definitely too-young girl were trapped with a Minotaur who did not want to do wrong, but had a genetically engineered compulsion to kill and eat virgins. So the viewpoint character had to relieve the underage character of her virginity to save her life.

I think I had bought both those books at once. After finishing them never touched another Piers Anthony book again. So , yeah, deeply creepy.

He has gone at many a fan with paranoid rages that revealed an astonishingly bizarre worldview.

I just have to wonder what his editor thought. And why no one at the publisher thought he was possibly crossing a line.

Which is a really slippery slope, I know. But when you've got a whole theme going ...