# The Hall of Shame



## moderan (Apr 13, 2010)

So, tell us: what's the worst fiction book you've ever read? What made it so bad?


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## moderan (Apr 13, 2010)

I hereby nominate Debbie Macomber's _A Good Yarn_, which wasn't. My girlfriend made me read it all the way through, and that was hard. It's leaky plotwise, populated by characters with less personality than cigar store Indians, written with all of the panache of a flattened souffle, and at 352 pages is about 351 pages too long. Even worse, it's part of a series.


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## Sam (Apr 13, 2010)

James Patterson's _Hide and Seek _is among the most prominent pieces of literary manure I've ever read. 

Oh, and of course there's _Twilight. _


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## moderan (Apr 13, 2010)

What made Hide and Seek so bad, Sam?


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## The Backward OX (Apr 14, 2010)

"Not to butt in," he said, as he did, "but the fact it was by Patterson is reason enough."


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## The Backward OX (Apr 14, 2010)

Recently? _The Frozen Circle ~ _Peter Watt. An excellent idea for a story, completely ruined by the lack of a single contraction in all 467 or 420 pages depending on which edition you read.


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## BitofanInkling (Apr 14, 2010)

Um, I'll come back. I posted in the wrong thread.


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## Ilasir Maroa (Apr 14, 2010)

I know this is probably a bit obvious, but the Inhertance Cycle by CP.  Star Wars with 2D dwarves.


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## moderan (Apr 14, 2010)

The Backward OX said:


> "Not to butt in," he said, as he did, "but the fact it was by Patterson is reason enough."


"Not to be any more of a contrarian than usual," he retorted, "but I've never read anything by James Patterson. Not that I'm especially curious, otherwise I would have, but what's so bad?"


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## Sam (Apr 14, 2010)

moderan said:


> What made Hide and Seek so bad, Sam?



Patterson's first books, _Along Came a Spider _and _Kiss the Girls_, were the beginning of a series about a psychologist called Alex Cross and were hailed as the best psychological thrillers since Harris' _The Silence of the Lambs. 

_1996's _Hide and Seek, _however, was a stand-alone about a successful musician, Maggie Bradford, and had the tag-line: "Maggie Bradford is one of the most beloved singer/songwriters anywhere. She's also the devoted mother of two children. She seems to have it all. And so, how could she have murdered not just one, but two of her husbands? With unrelenting suspense, James Patterson answers that question". 

Unrelenting suspense my arse. The book starts off in first-person narrative with a flashback to Bradford killing her abusive first husband. Then, for the following three-quarters of the novel, Patterson goes into a monotonous screed about how she now has the perfect life, has sold millions of albums, and is dating the most glamorous athlete in the world. It started slow and it never picked up pace from there. I kept reading because I thought it had to get better, but the ending was clichéd, the writing flat, and the characters underdeveloped. Compared to the page-turning _Along Came the Spider_, this book nearly put me off Patterson for good.


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## moderan (Apr 14, 2010)

Didn't the second one (Kiss the Girls) become a film? Pretty sure I've seen that. I've seen the books on the stands, but they don't interest me at all. I only picked up SotL because I had read Black Sunday years earlier and enjoyed that.
I have a buncha Michael Slade books, which seem more-or-less similar in approach. They're compulsively readable but not so great if you think about them. Really well-researched though.


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## Non Serviam (Apr 14, 2010)

_Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health_ by L. Ron Hubbard.

Yes, it's fiction.

It's so bad because, well, damn.


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## moderan (Apr 14, 2010)

Yes. Hubbard was a decent sf writer way back when though.


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## Non Serviam (Apr 14, 2010)

moderan said:


> Yes. Hubbard was a decent sf writer way back when though.



The only other one of his that I've started to read was Battlefield Earth, but it was so execrable that I only managed the first fifty pages or so.  Which of his titles was actually decent?


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## Sam (Apr 14, 2010)

moderan said:


> Didn't the second one (Kiss the Girls) become a film? Pretty sure I've seen that. I've seen the books on the stands, but they don't interest me at all. I only picked up SotL because I had read Black Sunday years earlier and enjoyed that.
> I have a buncha Michael Slade books, which seem more-or-less similar in approach. They're compulsively readable but not so great if you think about them. Really well-researched though.



I think both of them became films. 

Will have to check out the Slade guy. Never heard of him.


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## Leyline (Apr 14, 2010)

Non Serviam said:


> The only other one of his that I've started to read was Battlefield Earth, but it was so execrable that I only managed the first fifty pages or so.  Which of his titles was actually decent?



_Fear_
_Final Blackout_
_Typewriter In The Sky_
_Ole Doc Methusalah_

Also, _Battlefield Earth_ is terrific if you take it for what it is: a loving parody of Golden Age SF. _Mission:Earth_ is a brilliant satire that actually insults scientology itself throughout ten volumes, continually slamming people who buy into psycho-religious cults be they governmental, private or criminal. Very few series have made me laugh out loud so many times.

I'm an unrepentant defended of Hubbard though. I admire him as a pulp stylist and the finest con-man who ever lived. He died happy, suckers.


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## Non Serviam (Apr 14, 2010)

Meh.  I never really appreciated golden age SF either; apart from HG Wells, the first SF author whose work I really enjoy is Larry Niven.  So I was never going to be a Battlefield Earth fan cos I don't get the references.


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## Leyline (Apr 14, 2010)

Non Serviam said:


> Meh.  I never really appreciated golden age SF either; apart from HG Wells, the first SF author whose work I really enjoy is Larry Niven.  So I was never going to be a Battlefield Earth fan cos I don't get the references.



Understandable. Better than most people, who judge it by the odious film adaption that seemed to be adapted by people hell-bent on erasing everything fun about the book. Honestly, though, a faithful adaption would have been the most expensive movie ever made.


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## caelum (Apr 14, 2010)

I started reading Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, got a hundred or so pages in, but had to quit.  It wasn't anything the critics or anybody said it was.  The humour was bad, the story was retarded, and the writing itself was lousy and ugly.  Just an ugly book.  Master of Simile my ass; none of the guy's similes made any sense.  They just sounded impressive and snappy, which he seemed to think meant they meant something.  The book reeked of having been writ by an asshole.

I bought some Chris Moore books, got like ten pages in, and likewise had to quit.  I love bad jokes, but this guy's jokes were really, really bad, and his writing skills nonexistent.  Had to pass.

To a lesser degree, the same things happened with Catch 22 and Confederacy of Dunces.  A lesser degree meaning I almost finished these books before my sense of good taste compelled me to close them.  Confederacy of Dunces was an ugly, pointless mess that wasn't funny at all.  Catch 22 actually was funny, but way too absurd, like impossible-to-picture absurd.  Like everyone pretending the Doctor wasn't there because he was declared dead on some announcement; ignoring him right to his face.  That's not funny, and it's not fun to read.  Also, the dialogue was implausible and retarded.  I would probably write bad book reviews, cause I would just be like, this was retarded, this was retarded, this was retarded. lol

Damnit, I want there to be a solid, almost cinematic story that people can follow; not loosely connected, pseudointellectual scenes where the writer masturbates his ego all over the reader.  Some of the above books strike me this way.  Get over yourself and give me a story.

Also, was fairly disappointed in The Colour of Magic, though I hear Pratchett gets better in later novels.  Story was too weak and crazy, the characters names too boring, and it felt like a forced affair.  "By the way, the guys box?  It had hundreds of feet.  Yup.  And, um, like, there were some dragons.  Dragons are cool."  I think a good example of an author unwilling to reign in his out-there ideas _slightly_ is the discworld itself.  A world on a turtle . . . yeah, that's pretty sweet, actually.  But four elephants, too?  That's a bit much.  Other details just chucked in there classlessly: that god, um, he had hundreds of eyes, and they were floating everywhere!  The tentacle monster Lovecraft thing.


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## The Backward OX (Apr 14, 2010)

caelum said:


> I started reading Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, got a hundred or so pages in, but had to quit. It wasn't anything the critics or anybody said it was. The humour was bad, the story was retarded, and the writing itself was lousy and ugly. Just an ugly book. Master of Simile my ass; none of the guy's similes made any sense. They just sounded impressive and snappy, which he seemed to think meant they meant something. The book reeked of having been writ by an asshole.
> 
> I bought some Chris Moore books, got like ten pages in, and likewise had to quit. I love bad jokes, but this guy's jokes were really, really bad, and his writing skills nonexistent. Had to pass.
> 
> ...


If I ever got my novel finished, you'd possibly enjoy it, as it has not one word of bullshit in it. Big if.


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## caelum (Apr 14, 2010)

I probably would, judging by your imagination.  I'm working on my own right now, and I really think it will kick ass, but it takes a lot of dedication to pull off a novel sized project, I'm finding.


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## caelum (Apr 15, 2010)

I measure funny by laughs out loud, and that happened maybe twice with confederacy of dunces. I think our senses of humour are just very different, judging by other posts of yours I've seen.  Do you remember actually laughing at that book?  Yeah, apparently the book was loved by some critics, who cares.  That means nothing.  All I know is I didn't like it.


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## caelum (Apr 15, 2010)

Well, mystery explained, then.  And I'm flattered you remember my work.


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## Like a Fox (Apr 15, 2010)

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. 

It's his first and only novel.

It just failed on all counts for me. And that's bad, because I'm pretty unopinionated. I just allow myself to be passively entertained. I don't think this book knew what it wanted to be, which is a pity because all the elements potentially should have hooked me. It had history, and reincarnation, and a few other cool things I've tried pretty hard since to forget. I just didn't believe a word of it.


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## caelum (Apr 15, 2010)

I also laughed at Hitchhiker's.  Quite a lot.  Catch-22 was sort of like a weaker Hitchhiker's set in a warzone.  I definitely take an interest in comedic writing, and I think by now I've explored at least all the prominent comedy novels, but I am more interested in comedy as a supplementary feature to an already great story.  That's the one criticism I would lobby at Hitchhiker's; indeed, the only one I could, because it's freaken awesome.  It compromised the story's logical integrity for the sake of humour.  Jokes would occur that _were_ funny, but would singlehandedly annihilate the plausibility.  Hitchhiker's became something in which I could only look forward to jokes, not story.

Agreed on the difficulty of managing comedy in writing.  I think I'm slowly learning where I blunder, or where I overdo it, and so hopefully through merciless editing I will be able to distill my own material to only the funniest jokes.  Only the things that work. I work hard on personal objectivity, but that's really by definition impossible.  I'm a fan of the phrase, murder your children.  As in getting rid of your first ideas that however much you love, you know on some level aren't good enough.


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## The Backward OX (Apr 15, 2010)

[ot]





Like a Fox said:


> I'm pretty unopinionated. I just allow myself to be passively entertained.


You wouldn't be much fun on top of a haystack then.


*that was a euphemism*

[/ot]


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## Like a Fox (Apr 15, 2010)

The Backward OX said:


> [ot]
> You wouldn't be much fun on top of a haystack then.
> 
> 
> ...


I'll haystack you.


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## moderan (Apr 17, 2010)

To continue from a couple of posts previous...caelum, I beg to differ. I think Hitchhiker's is a weaker version of Catch-22. There are funnier sf books that didn't get the notoriety (John Sladek's _Reproductive System_ is one), and funnier books in general. Even laugh-out-loud funny if that's what you're looking for.
Try Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which has the Helleresque absurdism and the out-loud chuckles, and the sophistication to slug it out with other absurdists like Vonnegut.
Tom Robbins and his hippy silliness put me to sleep too.


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## Crazed Scribe (Apr 18, 2010)

_The Night Angel Triology_ by Brent Weeks. Full of plastic mannequins that share witty banter that falls flat. It just irritated me as I read it.

_Poison, Magic and Fire Studies_ by Maria V. Snyder Three seperate books and all totally ridiculous. Even for fantasy. The main character becomes practically a good who solves everything, has the power to accomplish anything and everybody automatically looks to her for leadership. And if i remember rightly there were also some annoying plot holes too.

_Graceling_ by Kristing Cashore. Similar sort of thing to the one above. It's just really shallow - no depth or thought to the plot.


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## caelum (Apr 18, 2010)

moderan said:


> To continue from a couple of posts previous...caelum, I beg to differ. I think Hitchhiker's is a weaker version of Catch-22. There are funnier sf books that didn't get the notoriety (John Sladek's _Reproductive System_ is one), and funnier books in general. Even laugh-out-loud funny if that's what you're looking for.
> Try Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which has the Helleresque absurdism and the out-loud chuckles, and the sophistication to slug it out with other absurdists like Vonnegut.
> Tom Robbins and his hippy silliness put me to sleep too.



Hmm, may have to check that one out.  One book I found extremely entertaining was Stephen Colbert's book.  Was cracking up every page.


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## moderan (Apr 18, 2010)

Thompson is funnier than Colbert or PJ O'Rourke. Just avoid the movie adaptations.


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