50 Shades of Gronk

The NFL can’t stop Rob Gronkowski. And it can’t stop A Gronking to Remember, either.

The Boston Globe reported yesterday that Amazon pulled the racy novel due to protests by the No Fun League. But today volume one in the “Rob Gronkowski Erotica Series” not only appears with 23 reviews and a three-and-a-half-star rating at Amazon, it also ranks as number one in the “BDSM Erotica” category. It currently ranks #346 among the more than a million books listed at Amazon.

And why not? The publisher’s description teases a steamy page-turner certain to entice bored housewives, BDSM erotica bookworms, and latent homosexuals channeling their carnal desires upon the Sunday cheering of beefy men on television screens. “When Leigh accidentally witnesses NFL’s one-man wrecking ball, Rob Gronkowski, do his patented ‘Gronk Spike’—his notorious monster smashing of a football into the stratosphere,” the description reveals, “Leigh’s heart goes apitter-patter and she becomes seriously turned on. Now normally sheepish Leigh can’t stop thinking about it. And she’ll stop at nothing until the romance of a lifetime is hers!”

In the tradition of Howl, Leaves of Grass, and Lolita, this work of literature faces opposition from schoolmarms and Savonarolas. The stated objections to A Gronking to Remember stems from Gronkowski’s image appearing on the book’s cover wearing a New England Patriots uniform, including the “MHK” patch honoring team owner Robert Kraft’s late wife Myra. The owner, apparently, took tribute as insult. However the philistines wish to disguise their opposition to culture, the sad fact remains that author Lacey Noonan, like Alduous Huxley, J.D. Salinger, Salman Rushdie, and so many others in her craft, endures attack by the benighted because they enlighten through the written word.

And those written words enliven as much as enlighten. “I picture being mauled by a huge monolith of a man,” reads the Amazon bestseller. “My body used for his hard pleasure; a stone god gripping me in his hands. He hoists me in the air. My clothes are ripped from my body, my quivering flesh open and available, my body ready to be used by the strong force of the universe, a ravaging, rampaging man. He brushes aside his loincloth. And then…”

As the prose suggests, A Gronking to Remember isn’t her first novel. Noonan, some readers will remember, also penned Eat Fresh: Flo, Jan & Wendy and the Five Dollar Footlong, I Don’t Care if My Best Friend’s Mom’s a Sasquatch, She’s Hot and I’m Taking a Shower with Her, and Shipwrecked on the Island of the She-Gods: A South Pacific Trans Sex Adventure. As her bio redundantly points out, the pseudonymous Noonan “loves wordplay and foreplay in equal measure.”

You can’t stop A Gronking to Remember. Like its subject, you can only hope to contain it. As the cover explains, Gronking acts as the “passion that could not be spiked.”