Suggested Punishment : Forced to listen to Jar-Jar read War and Peace on a continuous-loop tape for one year.
John Byrne
Wrote : She-Hulk, Superman, Wonder Woman, X-Men, etc.
Offense : Everything he’s written in the last ten years.
Suggested Punishment : Amputation of fingers, so he’d never hold a pen again.
Who else?
I started this in the Pit because it is, in essence, a pitting. But it is also Cafe Society related. Admins, feel free to give it a move if you think it appropriate.
Robert Jordan
Created: The Wheel of Time series
Offense: Stretching material for 5 books into 13, largely by describing women’s arm position relative to their breasts, and what color their dresses are “slashed” with. Also, the series still isn’t finished after 15-odd years.
Punishment: Handing over all copyrights to George Martin, so he can rewrite everything and make it good.
Too fucking right. The last book of his I started contained 100 fucking pages of details on it being really, really cold. It badly needed the guys from Holy Grail shouting GET ON WITH IT!
I started reading King’s books when he published The Stand. So I ventured into Carrie, The Shining, etc.
BUT WHAT THE HELL has happened. IT?? A FUCKING SPIDER FROM MARS? Just about every book after that except The Talisman and maybe The Green Mile has just been excruciating to read. They make my head hurt. I am still pissed that I waded through IT for that FUCKING Space Spider.
How many hundreds of dollars I have spent hoping this book won’t be a worthless piece of shit but what do I get? Space people in yellow raincoats putting up signs for lost dogs. The Black House? Can you say FUCKING STUPID???
He should be forced to read the crap he writes or at the very least send me my money back.
Please. If you’re going to talk about bad writers, there is only one choice. There is one man who has built crappy writing into a mountain…a veritable monument to crappiness. All other crappy writers can only peer up at his accomplishments in envy.
I give you…L. Ron Hubbard. I subjected myself to all TEN volumes of his Mission Earth series. I wanted to remove my brain and stick it in the autoclave halfway through the first one. It went downhill from there. My soul has been permanently stained by exposure to his effluvia. I forced myself to finish the whole series just so I could warn the rest of humanity about it.
Horrible, horrible stuff. Nothing even comes close.
Offense: continuing to purchase and/or read the works of authors that they admit have “jumped the shark” a long time ago (or were never on this side of the shark in the first place)
Punishment: a smack over the head and the instructions “If you don’t like their writing, STOP READING IT, dumbass!”
Yeesh. I’m not saying no one should ever criticize authors, but reading all ten volumes of Mission Earth? That’s either masochism or stupidity. Or both. Surely you must have figured out in the first chapter or two that the series was crap–why on God’s mostly green Earth did you keep reading? So you could whine about it on a message board? Put DOWN the book and back away.
It may surprise you to hear that Hubbard was quite an able pulp writer at the beginning of his career. Pre-religion.
Harry Turtledove
How many visions of alternate histories can one writer kick out? Keep an eye on Turtledove to find out. Churning out one after another after another. Stilted plots, wooden characters, and forced dialogue. What’s worse is the man can write a little bit when he takes the time and trouble to do so.
What, no mention of Anne Rice?
Wrote: The Vampire Chronicles, the Mayfair Witches Saga
Crime: Going off the deep end and falling in love with herself. The first MW book was great-Lasher was okay (I did enjoy the flashbacks), but Taltos was unreadable. Anymore, her stories consist of nothing more than beautiful undead creatures whining about how much it sucks to be beautiful and undead. Well, in between violent and really disturbing orgies which are just another way to say, “See? I’m soooo deep and dark!”
Hey, lay offa L. Ron! Sure, he was an awful, awful writer–but he was a good storyteller. I’d rather read Hubbard than Stephen King any day. Every few years, I find myself re-reading the Ole Doc Methusela stories, Slaves of Sleep, or Typewriter in the Sky.
In my case, it was morbid curiosity.
And to add to the thread, I think Michael Crichton should be fed to the shoggoths. I’ve only read one book by him–Sphere–and have sworn never to read his work again. The end of Sphere was the worst literary cop-out I’ve ever been subjected to.
Going with that idea, Nora Roberts should be cloned (in the science fiction fashion in which an exact duplicate is magically created), the clone should be named J.D. Robb, and the two of them should be walled up in a room together for all eternity.
They can have all the paper and ink they want sent in to them, but nothing can come out. They will very shortly be buried under the sheer weight of their own dreck. Better them then some innocent bookseller, I say.
Can’t say I agree with every last word of this, but it comes close enough that I don’t feel any need to rehash King. Instead I will nominate Thomas Harris.
Wrote: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, etc.
Crime: Hannibal, in which Agent Starling behaves in a completely, how shall I put it, BULLSHIT manner. To me, it was not consistent at all with her character. I was pissed off for three days after finishing that.
Punishment: A kick in the balls.
Wrote: the Belgariad, etc., mostly bad franchise crap.
Offense:everything after, and arguably, including, the Belgariad.
Abstract: really wooden, repetitive characters who have finished saying or doing anything original by the end of the first book. David and/or Leigh at this point are purposefully, gleefully ripping off the reading public by repeating the same chunks of conversation and plot, and having the sheer balls to present their laziness as a thematic element! Cyclic repetition, my ass. Granted, I thought it was fairly entertaining when I read it in 6th grade, but my tastes have ripened a bit since.
Then they do the same thing for another five books!
Then they ripped off all the dialogue and character templates from the Balgariad and recycled it for every single other book they’ve ever written.
Terrible.
Suggested punishment: The Eddingses, Robert Jordan, and Terry Goodkind should all be chained together with concertina wire and be forced to read each others’ work aloud to each other until they all agree never to write again.
Well, with Jordan at least, the first book, Eye of the World, was good. Not great, not the best fucking book that could possibly ever be written in all universes, but good. The Great Hunt was also good, maybe even a little better. Books 3 and 4 went downhill a bit, but by then I was totally into the story. For all its faults, the story was pretty interesting. But after book 6 or so, he really started sssttttrrreeetttccchhiinnngggg it out to near infinite length, and so I stopped reading. I haven’t read the 2 most recent ones, but from what I’ve heard the plot of both could be condensed into about a third of a book by an author who wasn’t trying to milk the series dry.
This is probably too easy, but I think we could do without approximately 50% of the fantasy authors out there. I mean, if I can’t sell my fiction, I’ll just write fantasy. I think anyone who can string two words together – and many who can’t – can get published in that genre.
I don’t know. There are a lot of good fantasy writers out there of course, but total incompetence doesn’t seem to be a barrier in that field.
Worst ones I’ve read: the husband/wife team Barbara and Scott Seigel. I forced myself to finish one book of theirs (I make it a point to finish books I start). Their work is vomit in literary form. It had no redeeming qualities. It read like a romance novel without much sex. It was cliched, unrealistic even by the standards of fantasy, with long passages that made me yearn for the excitment and wit of a Dick and Jane primer.
I admit to having an incurable urge to read Nora (or JD)… more her JD books.
I also admit to liking the Eddings, at least the Belgariad series and Redemption of Althalus… I started on Elder Gods… and will probably finish it but I do really see the repetition now (and probably won’t finish this series out.)
Jordan, I couldn’t get past the first half of the second book. my ex-roommate sung his praises all the time and finally dropped the books in my lap and ordered me to read, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have even gotten that far.
I’ll admit to liking a lot of ‘bad’ books, mainly because for me… it doesn’t matter, unless they are EXTREMELY bad or drawn out. Books are my friends and I sometimes like to visit the people within. It’s a bit of an escape from this world.
But anyone who constantly repeats themselves or drags things on forever… I do stop reading anything new and just stick with the old favourites. I think it’s a lot like people who like campy movies because they are campy, only I seem to have a wider selection to choose from
Thank god for Libraries! Otherwise I’d have a bookshelf full of tons of dreck, I only have a moderate amount of it
