The editors at Literary Review have awarded this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction prizes, and this year top honors went to Rachel Johnson for an especially lurid passage in her novel Shire Hell. The Review’s deputy editor Tom Fleming explained that Johnson’s inventive use of animals–specifically cats, moths, and slugs–earned her this special recognition:

All the passages this year are equally awful, but Rachel Johnson’s struck us because of the mixture of cliche and euphemism…. There were a couple of really bad animal metaphors in there.”

However, the really big wiener–sorry, big winner–this year was John Updike, who made the short list an unprecedented fourth time for a passage in The Widows of Eastwick involving oral sex between a 70-year-old woman and a younger man, complete with a messy pr0nstar finish. That was enough to earn Updike a special Lifetime Achievement Award for writing thoroughly cringeworthy sex scenes. So far, Updike hasn’t commented on the recognition, but Johnson was thrilled to receive the award, a plaster statuette of a human foot (“an abstract representation of sex,” according to Fleming). She promised to do what she could to emulate Updike’s achievement—although, as she admitted, “he sets the bar very high.”