I adore Neil Gaiman, but I really, really hated “Keepsakes and Treasures.” Luckily it was in a short story collection with many excellent entries, including “A Study in Emerald” and “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire,” so the book itself isn’t a total loss, but I did stop reading there, and haven’t been back to finish yet, it turned me off so much.
Terry Pratchett’s last two books have been…less than expected, but then, that is to be expected, considering. I’ll buy the rest of his output, as long as that lasts, but I’ll pretty much stop the Disc at “I Shall Wear Midnight.”
You might want to get other opinions on these books, but my experience with them was that they were dreadfully depressing, and I had to slog through them. I’ve read each one of the sequels two or three times, thinking that surely they couldn’t be that bad. But surely, they are.
Incidentally, Hambly has “Further Adventures Of” on her website, which are stories from some of her earlier series, such as Sun Wolf and Star Hawk and Joanna and Antryg. I haven’t read any of them yet, but they are available in several different e-formats, but not in dead tree versions.
This was what came to mind for me as well. I haven’t read all King’s books, but those I have read I have generally enjoyed, until Under the Dome. I couldn’t finish it and have not picked up one of his books since.
Huh, I actually liked Ghost Story, though it wasn’t my favorite from the Dresden series. shrug I’d say the biggest disappointment/shark jumping book in a series I liked was the final Dark Tower book…it’s pretty much the text book example of a series that I liked up to the final book, and especially the final chapter.
Another example is the latter books in Eric Flint’s 1632 Ring of Fire series. I really liked the first couple of books, but then it just went off the rails IMHO and got increasingly convoluted to the point I just couldn’t muster the energy to read any more.
-XT
I love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, and I really like her Chalion fantasy series.
The Sharing Knife series? Not so much. The first book is a sappy, unremarkable romance set in a bland fantasy world.
I have a feeling that it was more to do with his divorce: ISTM that his wife was his proofreader, and she stopped both when they divorced. The books up to and including Executive Orders were cracking stories; then he divorced and Rainbow 6 stank and The Bear & The Dragon wasn’t much better.
I like George R.R. Martin but [NO SPOILERS FOLLOW] really wish he’d ask himself "does this passage actually need to be here? For example, if describing a royal banquet, do you think it’s necessary to describe each and every dish [both in the edible sense and the dishes [and silverware] themselves] in great detail, or is it okay to just spend a couple of sentences letting everybody know it was a huge no-expense-spared overkill of a feast? Or, in describing a queen’s gown, is it necessary to spend a paragraph or two describing the material and stopping just short of giving the pattern and some cutting instructions or is saying it’s a beautiful green gown trimmed with gold enough? I think in both cases, less is more. I’m also less bothered by his famous habit of killing off major characters (his works are inspirede by several famous medieval dynastic wars, deaths of major characters are somewhat realistic) than by introducing brand new major characters 3,000 pages into the series. You’ve got several books to go, spare us the detail!
Another vote for John Grisham. I’d say he has written everything he ever had to say except that his book of short stories, Ford County, actually had a couple of stories with real potential that he should have developed into something longer (the young white guy with AIDS living with his family’s black tenant ca. 1985, for example, or the lawyer who is kidnapped by the family of the injured boy), but instead he keeps on writing David vs. Goliath books about tort reform and other themes he’s already visited several times.
Vernor Vinge’s latest was a big letdown for me. Thread here.
Jonathan Lethem - ugh. Seems like half his books I love, (Gun, With Occasional Music, The Ecstasy Of Influence, As She Climbed Across the Table), half I can’t stand. (Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, You Don’t Love Me Yet). Strange since they’re all pretty distinctively his style; some just miss the mark for me.
And I hated Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy so much that I mistrusted my own opinion and read it again. Nope - hated it.
I’ve loved most of Diane Duane’s books, but I couldn’t finish Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses.
Back in the early '90s, Ruth Rendell published The Copper Peacock, a collection of short stories. Funny thing: out of nine stories, not one had a real resolution. And most of them were pretty dull in the beginning and middle as well. Must have been a contractual obligation. Her publishers probably asked for a short-story collection when she was up to her eyebrows in something else*, so she pulled out some outlines she’d abandoned, filled them in and gave them endings. Not resolutions, just endings. I’m not the only person who was disappointed, either. (If you ever see it, “Mother’s Help” is the one that comes closest to being good.)
*Going Wrong, perhaps, and if that’s so, it was worth giving her full attention!
Oh, yeesh, that was miserable. Can you believe they tried to make a movie out of it? I quit the book and was disgusted at the poor quality of his work.
I did not enjoy Children of Hurin, but I hardly would count it as a Tolkien book, would you?
I just think he had a hard time dealing with the end of the Cold War. And the fact that he was living on top of a large pile of money took away the incentive to work at it.
What got me was the increasing number of “side story” books that had peripheral involvement with the main plot line. I’d buy another 16XX book and find none of the main characters, just some minor characters from previous novels elevated to main characters, traipsing around the nether-corners of Europe doing…something.
For some reason that’s made clear on a webzine.
That I hadn’t read.
IMO the classic example of the writer sliding down a steep hill is Philip Jose Farmer and the Riverworld series. To Your Scattered Bodies Go was a trememdous novel; the following The Fabulous Riverboat was very good, and the subsequent novels and stories just got progressively more awful.
My favorite horror author is Graham Masterton, and I like pretty much everything I’ve read of his in the horror genre (I haven’t read some of his young adult stuff nor any of his sex how-to manuals, but that’s another story :P) But he has one book called “Unspeakable” that…oh, ugh. It was okay through most of the book, but at the end he did something so unexpected, horrifyingly shocking, and just plain *uncool *that I came the closest I ever came to literally chucking the book across the room. I felt cheated for having read and enjoyed the book only to get to that utter turkey of an ending.
He went back to writing good stuff after that, though, so maybe he was just having a bad book day.
I used to love John le Carré but do not like his more recent works at all. (I wouldn’t even have bought the most recent books but N.Y.Times wrote that he was “back to his old form” – Now I want to take N.Y.Times to small-claims court. 
)
IMO, the best le Carré novels are his earliest (the very first two being whodunnits rather than spy stories): Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
My favorite le Carré may be Secret Pilgrim. Rather than a novel, it is more a series of vignettes, a form which may show le Carré at his best.
Iain Banks’ Transition. I understand he was trying something new, but it felt timid. If he couldn’t convince himself, how could he expect it of the reader? Yet I kept reading, waiting for the shell game to reveal even a crumb of Banks’ sly brilliance; all the way to the blunt, messy end.
When I saw this thread, I knew this book would come up. I did not like it. It was different from the usual Dresden book. Harry was fairly powerless and clueless during much of it, and many characters changed seemingly overnight, from our, and Harry’s perspective. Butcher went against previously-established ghost definitions. Previously, ghosts were just “psychic imprints” of a sort, left over when someone dies. In this case, the ghost really WAS Harry(yeah I know, it was explained). I spoke of my dislike in the Ghost Story thread when it came out.
Recently, I re-read it, and liked it more. Butcher stepped outside of his successful formula, and it’s rare to see that kind of risk taken. After all, why upset the cash cart? One of the reasons why I enjoy the series was how there was no “reset button”, and that people changed, learned, and dealt with what came before. Harry, and all the characters, have developed over the course of the series, and in the previous book they’ve all just come through some truly horrific stuff, even by their standards. This whole book is pretty much all about dealing with that. In retrospect, given what they’ve gone through, it makes sense that time be taken to examine that. If it pays off in upcoming books, it’s worth it.
I’ll add my vote to Under the Dome to the others in this thread. The characters are broadly-drawn caricatures.
This doesn’t quite fit in perfectly with the thread, but my pet peeve for the last year has been Rothfuss. He started off with the fantastic Name of the Wind. The book is as close to perfection as it can get, particularly for fantasy novels, although it was a very good, very well told story in general. The book, his blog, every interview and other interactions he had with fans gave the impression that he knew, and cared deeply, about stories, their pacing and flow and in general all aspects of the craft of writing. The second book when it came out, while it had many excellent examples of good writing contained within it, is just a massive let down. It’s poorly plotted, it takes the larger story next to nowhere and generally feels like it could have been a lot better.