[Prestidigitweeze]

Quoth JSWolf: "L. Ron Hubbard is one of the worst authors going."

A friend of mine enjoys books that are in his words "deliciously bad" and so insisted on reading Hubbard's last novel straight through.

According to him, the protagonist was an idealized version of Hubbard himself. Instead of the long-nailed and paranoid figure we're presented with in unauthorized documentaries and bios, the last-legs Hubbard in the book was a confident, charismatic and endlessly virile sage who liked to "cure lesbians of their preference" (direct quote) by having relations with them. According to the protag, no real man had ever initiated them into the joys of hetero pleasure.

Of course, the sage also had an adoring daughter who insisted on following him around with a camera as he did this and kept distracting him from achieving joy by taking snapshots. He eventually succeeded by pretending he was not at all excited. A direct quote from the book: "I had beaten her [the daughter] at her own game."

You don't hear a lot about that side of L. Ron Hubbard.