But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of "dirty words".
But in contrast to the popularity of the social media posts which correspond to the TMZ posts about Brown's deathbed photos, even Radar Online's treatment of the genuinely shocking subject matter didn't attract much engagement.
However, he had now emerged from his Christian period, and for his dissertation he chose a potentially shocking subject from ecclesiastical law concerning the nature of ancient Jewish religion.
4. 'THE MOONLIGHT ROOM' This first play by Tristine Skyler is a rarity from a young writer in this age of shocking subject matter and episodic, film-fluenced scripts: it's a realistic drama with both intelligence and a crowd-pleasing heart.
As early as 1981, critics were debating the value of his elegant style and shocking subjects (and referring, in one instance, to an earlier photographer as "the Robert Mapplethorpe of his generation").
He still tackles shocking subjects, from last meals on death row to City cocaine-taking, with a brazen bravado.
With its shocking subject-matter and grim petit-bourgeois setting, Thérèse Raquin was both commended and censured in almost equal measure when it was first published.
One of Hodler's most shocking subjects was his lover Valentine Godé-Darel, whom he painted on her death bed.
"We are in the second decade of the 21st Century and things are starting to change," says Welch. "The idea of being naked on a beach isn't the shocking, eyebrow-raising dinner party subject that it used to be.
Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation's westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle.
