First off the bat is The Anita Blake-Paranormal Pansexual Slut series. What started out as a paranormal detective series evolved into a “I’ve run out of mythological creatures to play S&M games with, so I better invent new ones” mess of a series. Add in the Mary Sue bit where she ends up practically becoming queen of every species she screws, and what you’ve got is something much worse than any of the “erotic” fan fiction based on this series.
Well, on seeing the thread title I was going to drop in, say Laurel K. Hamilton, and declare the thread over, but it looks like the OP already has it covered.
Well, this is really an “authors that should have abandoned the series after they wandered off into the woods while writing sequels” thread. Anita Blake started off good, and only went off into the weeds when it degenerated into soft-porn interspecies relationship geometry. As a supernatural police/detective procedural, it would have been fine.
Add David Weber to the list. He’s really only good at writing thundering space operas about huge space battles and improbably talented heroes gritting their teeth in the face of a sleet of incoming missiles. Any time he diverges into politics or (god help us) love stories, he becomes unreadable. So, guess what direction he heads in his increasingly ponderous Honor Harrington series? 800 pages of yapping about the politics of a civilization none of us care greatly about, followed by about 10 pages of anti-climactic pyrrhic victory space battle.
I remember the first handful of Xanth books being at least somewhat interesting in premise and world building. Then it just became a giant rut of bad puns and tween panties. Had Piers Anthony quit by book five or so, it might be redeemable on some level.
A general word to all fantasy authors: If you have created an elaborate fantasy world of magic swords and wizards and witches and whatnot, and your next plot line involves the revelation that the whole thing started centuries back with stranded colonists from Earth and that all the “magic” is actually “Science Gone Wonky”, then quit your series and start another one. Please.
There’s actually a good story in the Emberverse series. But it’s buried in way too much padding. He took what could have been a great four book series and turned it into a mediocre fourteen book series.
The same was true about Shadowspawn, which was a bad trilogy that should have been a good novel.
Piers Anthony–Xanth. The first two (maybe three) aren’t bad at all* and the second one is actually good, not just “Good, considering it’s Piers Anthony”. If he’d stopped at book three, Xanth would be remembered as a decent, if dated, fantasy. Instead he’s done another 30-some books that devolve into something that’s just barely on the safe side of kiddie porn. Plus one book that’s just an advertisement for a then-new Xanth computer game.
*Except the sexist, cringe-worthy “Date-rape is groovy IF the girl chooses to go with the guy.” thing that, to be fair, wasn’t culturally seen as bad in 1977 as it is now. And it gets worse every passing year.
Not that ANY of his books were really worth reading (and acknowledging that they were all filled with some pretty obnoxious viewpoints about the proper role of women in society), John Norman’s Gor series should have ended after book #6 (Raiders of Gor), when he gave up on ever actually trying to solve the mystery he had established in the first three books.
I’d agree about Tom Clancy, the common complaint about his work was that the moment the Soviet Union fell (which happened days after Sum of All Fears was released) all of his work that wasn’t set during that time period (like Without Remorse) was completely crap with unbelievable villains (Japan declares war on the US again! Iran takes over Iraq and becomes a superpower! Eco-terrorists try to murder everyone!) and his books apparently stopped being edited since they became 1,000 page behemoths where characters constantly repeat and restate stuff that was established pages early, and subplots that don’t go anywhere and have no pay-off. When the abridged audiobook is only eight hours long, and the unabridged is 40 hours long and I wished I had listened to the abridged version instead, you know you have a problem.