Authors writing stories about things they hate/find stupid/find funny.

Cafe Society
1

I was wondering this today after reading a bit about a romance novel (the name escapes me) that was written as a joke by several authors (each wrote a chapter without any knowledge of what the other authors had written in their chapters), following only a basic storyline, and the book was inexplicably successful.

Does anyone know of any more? I’m thinking of novels/short stories/poems/anything non-fiction written by an author that hated, disliked, was indifferent towards or just plain found the subject matter of their story to be stupid, lame or otherwise worth mocking. I don’t mean an author trying something new and afterwards disliking it, but an author intentionally writing about a subject or using a theme in a story that he didn’t actually like or believe in. The hard mode would be that the story became successful. It doesn’t necessarily have to be parody or satire, either, I’d like to keep this as open as possible. It could be written as a way of mocking the subject matter, an assault on the subject, an author just plain dicking around and making fun of a genre or style, or anything in between.

Examples to give everyone the general idea would be someone who hated steampunk writing a fantasy novel about it (for whatever reasons), someone who finds mythic creatures and wizards really lame and writing about that (for whatever reasons) and so on.

Anyone know of a few?

2

I think your original book is Naked Came The Stranger.

Would Atlanta Nights fit what you’re looking for? It’s not so much that the authors involved found the subject matter silly; they were doing it to spoof PublishAmerica.

3

From my point of view, I can’t say that I found the subject matter of **Atlanta Nights **silly when I wrote my chapter. Or rather, I did, but that was the point. But the point of the book was not to write a real, publishable novel in the first place.

4

Any superhero comic written by Garth Ennis.

He hates superheroes, and it shows.

Even in genres that he loves, his books are pretty nasty, but his superhero hate takes his takes on the genre to a whole new level of ‘yech’.

5

Arthur Conan Doyle was completely fed up with his Sherlock Holmes character and wanted to write more of his mystical/early scifi stuff. His intention was that Holmes really did die in the final struggle with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. But he was forced by popular acclaim, and need for income, to bring Holmes back in the short story “The Empty House.”

I typed all that from memory. Some of the facts/spelling might be wrong.