Candy, one of the bloggers at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, admits that she handed Shadow Bear, one of Cassie Edwards‘s nearly 100 romance novels, to one of her friends as an example of just how bad the genre can get. But she wasn’t expecting that friend to find “didactic passages… written in a distinctly different voice” which, when popped into Google, revealed striking similarities to other documents, including a Luther Standing Bear novel published in 1933. “Please note that we’re not making accusations of any sort,” Candy notes. “We’re merely providing evidence of Startling and Eerie Similarities between these Cassie Edwards novels and certain texts published prior to the Edwards books.”

Further investigation on the Smart Bitches’ part revealed more “Startling and Eerie Similarities” in more Edwards novels, including Savage Moon, Running Fox, and Savage Longings. One commenter even found a description of a Chippewa lodge in 2007′s Savage Torment that was awfully close to a description of a lodge in 2006′s Savage Obsession. So: Is this just a lot of examples of the sort of creative absorption regarded as acceptable in the hands of literary masters like Ian McEwan, a postmodern assault on textuality à la Kathy Acker, or something else less savory? Candy says she’s sent the results of her research on to Edwards’ publishers at Penguin Group and Dorchester Publishing, so the ball is in their (and Edwards’s) court for now.

UPDATE: Another SB reader has added Savage Beloved to the list of Edwards’s novels with eyebrow-raising passages.