There’s only one book of Stephen King’s I’ve liked, and that one book was Carrie. The rest are fairly boring with interspersed GORYGORY or OH-LOOK-AT-HOW-SCARY-I-CAN-BE sequences. Ugh.
Oh, someone got to Anne Rice’s irritating habit of digressing from plot and character development for something like fifty pages to explain an unrelated background story that is more often than not told in more or less the same way in another of her books. I love her writing, but I skip all of the random flashback sequences.
But most of all, I absolutely despise the way Lois Duncan has gotten by for – is it forty years already? – writing the same frigging plot about a shy, unassuming, plain teenage girl who uncovers a major scandal/evil secret and no one believes her and oh my she almost dies until someone [usually the male love interest] saves the day and everyone fawns over her saying, “I’m so sorry.”