This topic was inspired by this recently revived thread about a Piers Anthony book I’d never even heard of:
Alternative titles being “author’s too famous to edit, who really should have been” and “Do the terrible last books in a series tell us something about the author’s true self?”
Now Piers Anthony is famous for doing this with multiple series. What is your favorite example of a series that becomes unreadable for whatever reason?
Mine is Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which stopped focusing on plot after half a dozen books, a dozen books(?). I don’t quite remember. And even more so her second big series, which takes the same turn into all erotica all the time in book three.
George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire of Ice is a variation of this. It’s not that the quality has declined, but that the output has basically stopped. He has written five of the planned seven books. The fifth was published in 2011 and took six years to write.
Piers Anthony might be the poster child for this. The Xanth series has twenty plus books, but only the first few are any good. The rest are a mishmash of puns, innuendo, and misogyny.
Nagaru Tanigawa is the author of the Japanese light novel series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The last novel took 10 years to write. The series is not done.
George R. R. Martin is obvious, and of course someone mentioned him first.
I hate to have to say this, but S.M. Stirling has become an example of this.
His early books were tautly written. He would pack a lot of story into a single book.
But now his work is bloated. He’ll write a trilogy that should have been a single book or a twelve book series that should have been a trilogy. I’ll still read his books but I find myself slogging through pages that feel like they have no reason to be there. And when I get to the end, I’ll often find myself asking “Was that all there was?”
Robert Jordan must be rotating furiously in his grave with George R.R. Martin stealing the “terribly slow work on a popular fantasy series” throne. Jordan did it all years before Martin and didn’t even have a TV-series to distract him and placate some fans. Sure, he did then also up and die, but who believes he would not have taken years and years to publish the next book?
That’s the one I immediately thought of. I loved the first half dozen or so books. The world building was honestly kind of janky, but the main character was really compelling, and the books were (for me) just about an ideal blend of romance, humor, action, horror, and drama. Then, as you say, it just turned into erotica. Which is fine, but I fell in love with the badass vampire-slayer necromancer PI…ahem, I mean, I fell in love with the adventures of the badass vampire-slayer necromancer PI, not the human/vampire/lycanthrope/other polyamorous erotica the series turned into.
The Anita Blake books largely moved away from the all sex all the time a few books back; it’s now far more about solving mysteries, killing the bad guys, and politics (which Anita loathes). There’s usually a few scenes, but they’re easy to skip. (I’d skip Jason, though, that one is almost nothing but one long bedroom scene.)
I just checked and I read 14 Anita Blake books. I think that is enough of one series irregardless of quality! But I’m happy that people with different reading habits haven’t had another dozen-plus books at the worst level of the ones I read.
I used to follow David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. The first… seven, or so? books were good, but then he started falling into a slog of almost no actual development of the plot. One time, I was in a bookstore, and saw the latest one on a shelf, and wasn’t sure if I had read it yet. So I read the synopsis on the dust jacket… and still wasn’t sure if I had read it yet. That’s when I realized I was done with the series.
I’m not sure about Dresden Files. The last couple (Peace Talks and Battle Ground) do sort of feel like Butcher is getting tired of the series and wants to just end it… but the one before those (with a long hiatus in between), Skin Game, was one of the best of the series. I’m willing to give him another book or two before I make up my mind.
I read the first 11 Honor Harrington and the first 12 Dresden files books, and for neither of them I stopped because they weren’t “good” anymore, I just stopped finding the further life events of Harrington and Dresden interesting.
Tom Clancy was the first author that came to mind. IIRC, he started drifting into side work (Op Center & Net Force) because he was struggling to find compelling paths/story arcs for Ryan, Clark, Chavez and the rest of the crew. He eventually farmed out his side projects to a staff, which ended carrying it onwards. But, now that he’s gone, I don’t think it fits the OP anymore.
Martha Grimes’ series about Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard Superintendent, his friend a titled Lord (but who doesn’t use the title) and his hypochondriac sergeant. The gimmick of this series is that each one is named for a colorful British pub. It’s semi-light-hearted with serious undertones, and a supporting cast of colorful characters (now including a cat and a dog from time to time, which should have been a clue that it was going downhill).
It started out great and went on pretty well for a while. The last one I read, which was the last one published so far, was just horrible – the plot drifted and jumped, no sense to anything, it looked like she just sat down and typed for a while every day and didn’t bother to link up the various parts of the story. The previous 2 or 3 were almost as bad, but this one made me swear off the series. To be fair, it’s the 25th book, and there aren’t many who are creative enough to keep a series fresh that long. But I wasn’t looking so much for freshness as making sense.
Looks like she’s due for another entry pretty soon, if her once every two years schedule is going to be maintained.
Some series, particularly mystery, suffer from what I call the “Elizabeth George Effect”. The first book in the series will be something like 85% plot, 15% backstory/drama. Then, over time, the books will shift to something like 50% plot, 50% backstory/drama.
I think that inevitably some authors fall in love with their characters and their history, and it’s so much easier to write than an actual complicated plot.
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is a possible example. The first four books were very good. IMHO the last three were of much lower quality and seemed rushed. He did have an intervening brush with death when he was struck by a van in 1999 and severely injured. One of the things that made the final three books of lower quality was that he wrote himself into the books as a character, including the real life accident with the van.
I’m finishing up a Stephen King Dark Tower reread and while it was only 7 novels (a few short stories and a novella too) and it’s done, it took years and years and the quality for me went rapidly down with each successive book.
Not the least of which was the meta crap and the author self-insert.
I disagree about Dark Tower. I disliked the first book so much, it put me off reading the rest of the series for years, but when I finally did, I liked book 2 and loved the ones after that, including the last ones.