Critics hate Grey. So why can’t readers get enough of the dark side of Fifty Shades?

E L James’s reworking of Fifty Shades has been critically panned, but, for some of the millions who will buy it, part of the pleasure comes from ignoring the reviews

We’ve all been there: unexpectedly confronted by an inept student interviewer as we sit in our swanky offices running an eponymous global communications empire. But not all of us have the discernment to realise that underneath “a shapeless sweater, an A-line brown skirt, and utilitarian boots” lies the perfect candidate for our obsessively clandestine sub-dom lifestyle. Not all of us, of course, are Christian Grey, the billionaire BDSM enthusiast whose relentlessly far-fetched adventures – the bedroom scenes being the least disbelief-inducing element in a trilogy that includes much flying around in private helicopters and foiling kidnap plots – have sold 125 million copies and been translated into 52 languages.

Until this month E L James, the 52-year-old former TV executive author of what she describes as “provocative romance”, had only given us the story from the point of view of Anastasia Steele, she of the brown skirt (soon replaced by control freak Christian with smarter clothes or, more usually, nothing but a cable tie). In Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as a piece of internet fan fiction based on the Twilight series and posted under the name Snowqueens Icedragon, and its sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, we followed Ana’s alternating repulsion from, and attraction to, her companion’s “singular erotic tastes”, and her faltering attempts to persuade him of the joys of a more “vanilla” approach to sex and relationships.

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