Seems like H.P. Lovecraft rates a mention. When he’s good, he’s hard to beat; but he really did write some awful, offensive crap.
Heinlein, for me, stopped writing good novels with 1967’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Prior to that, there were few novels of his that I didn’t greatly enjoy. After it, few that didn’t disappoint me at least a little on the first reading; there are none that I’d like to read again.
None of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman work has disappointed me. Little of what I’ve read of his that wasn’t Flashman didn’t disappoint me.
Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons.
Having read all of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, I seriously doubt that Connelly actually wrote Nine Dragons. It reads as if written by a ghostwriter working from an outline.
If Connelly is the author, he published an early draft.
Everything Roger Zelazny wrote in his Amber series after the conclusion of the original series was drek. Drek that got drekkier as it went on. In a way, it is a blessing that he died before he could piss any more on his own legacy.
As I mentioned in the Frederick Forsyth thread, I love all his books – except The Phantom in Manhattan, a grossly misguided attempt to write a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. It’s totally unlike his other books, tries to cover immensely different ground, and flops. It’s realy a sequel to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, not Gaston Leroux’s original novel (I gather Webber and Forsyth are buds), and I have no idea what he, or anyone associated with this, was thinking. Fortunately, he went back to writing political/military thrillers.
The first book by Robert Heinlein that I read when it was fresh, hot off the press was The Number of the Beast. I couldn’t believe how awful it was. I reread it again a couple of years ago, and I still can’t. People keep trying to defend it, but their arguments fall apart. The book is a clumsy mess. Any book that spends whole chapters with four people arguing the legalities of who ought to be in control of their ship obviously isn’t terrifically concerned about its readers. Although other people disagree, I think Heinlein came back into orm afterwards. I didn’t like Friday much, but I did like his other later books.
Richard Shenkman’s One Night Stands with American History wasn’t all that good a book, although I see that it’s still on sale at historic sites. But his next book, Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, was great. It spawned an audiobook version (read by Gary Owens, of Laugh-in) and a short-lived cable series. His next book, with the unwieldy title I Love Paul Revere, Whether he Rode or Not, is also great, but woefully underappreciated (maybe because of the title). But his next book, Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of World History, reads like a Contractual Obligation Book. It’s too brief, too light on information and references, and too breezy in its presentation. The tyupe is large and the margins wide, which is what they do when there’s not really enough text. AFAIK, he hasn’t written another book.
I read and consistently enjoyed Dick Francis’ novels until one he wrote after his wife died (“Shattered”?). It was so disconnected and boring that I stopped halfway through and left the book in a motel room. Unthinkable based on his mostly excellent output to that point. I’ve never again bought any of his stuff including the novels written with his son. Sometimes you have to know when to stop writing*.
I had not read any Stephen King for a long time before last summer when I got a used copy of “Dreamcatcher”. I will not be reading any more for an even longer time.
*Hello, Lawrence Block.
I love Lisa Scottoline’s series about an all-female Philadelpha law firm. Her latest standalone books have veered dangerously into Jodi Picoult territory, and the latest, Come Home, disappointed me terribly. It’s about a pediatrician about to marry for the third time (once widowed, once divorced) whose stepdaughter from the second marriage arrives unexpectedly to say her father, the woman’s ex-husband, is dead, and the daughter is sure it was murder. The woman had good reason to divorce the scheming SOB, and she thinks the daughter is just distraught, but she just can’t help herself and looks into it anyway. The whole premise is “she’s an ex-stepdaughter but a mother’s love still has no boundaries,” and it’s very manipulative.
She really hits that note over and over again, about a Mother’s Love, and bundles in some stuff about one of the doctor’s patients, a little boy who is In Danger because his blood tests haven’t come back with some Important Information. The diversity card has to be played and the baby’s mother is Indian, but just in case readers won’t identify with that, the father is an All-American GI who’s now deployed in Afghanistan. We Must Save the Baby! I was surprised she didn’t include a checklist in the back of the book.
I have met Scottoline and she is one of the warmest, friendliest, brightest people ever. I can’t wait until she goes back to the legal thrillers instead of these fuzzy mom things.
I’ve read the Darwath one - I wish she’d write a lot more Darwath ones but not crappy ones like the ones she did write. (I love that original trilogy - just revisited it last year wondering if it was as good as I remembered from high school and it totally was, but man are those sequels very okay!)
My problem with the Ringworld sequels is that they try to shoehorn a bunch of 90’s ideas (e.g. nanobots) into a 70’s setting with clunky results. I liked Protector, but I agree that the efforts to tie everything into the same world left a whole lot of plot holes.
But I’ll take any of the mediocre Ringworld sequels over Escape from Hell, the terrible, pointless sequel to Inferno.
I’ll add another vote for Stephen King (e.g. Insomnia, The Regulators) and I’ll toss in Piers Anthony (too many examples to mention).
Two for me. One I understand and it just didn’t work for me, and the other I haven’t even read cuz I know I’ll hate it.
My favorite author is Boris Starling. He writes serial killer mystery novels and he normally is really good with it (a bit formulaic maybe but oh well) except he wrote a book called Vodka which was a different style of murder mystery and one that it’s obvious he wrote “for him”, which I didn’t like. I don’t fault him too much though because he took a risk and it just didn’t work.
Steve Alten is another one of my favorites but he wrote a completely off-the-wall-nothing-like-him book called Shell Game that was just weird. It was a crazy political book that was basically just a vice to get his opinions on politics out there. It was about 9/11 being an inside job, and oil, and the war, and republicans are evil blah blah blah. I don’t even know where that book came from much less having a desire to read it.
Taylor Caldwell’s basically Catholic mix of Birchism & New Thought metaphysics worked for me in her novels Dear And Glorious Physician (about St. Luke), Great Lion of God (about St. Paul), and A Pillar of Iron (about Cicero). She totally fell flat when dumping the Catholicism or even most of the orthodox Christianity for total New Ageyness in I, Judas (about, of course, Judas Iscariot).
Much has already been said but I will repeat those that apply to me.
Clancy after Executive Orders. I didn’t even read Bear and the Dragon.
Grisham after some point. I can’t even say why other than I got tired of reading him.
Charlaine Harris’ Sookie/Southern Vampire novels. The last one I read, which is one or two from current, did nothing for me so I haven’t bothered with anything else. But before then, I enjoyed them.
MaryJanice Davidson’s Bitsy series. Yes, it had romance as part of it but I really liked vampire society and the rules she was doing. However, she definitely went in a new direction and it didn’t interest me anymore.
RA Salvatore, who wrote a lot of DND novels. I used to love his stuff but now I find it awful, awful stuff. I get more from a summary than his books. In fact, I recently read a comic on an original story from him and that was awful as well! There were signs, though, when I couldn’t even get through The Woods Out Back or that his Demon Awakens stories never pulled me in beyond the first book.
Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. I thought it was a trilogy, so years after the fact, was surprised that there was more, since it did end in a weird place. However, none of the books after three were very good to me.
Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I read through book ten but didn’t like the books after book six, so stuck it out that far. I have heard from friends that Sanderson does a good job with ending it but I don’t care anymore. That’s over a ten year reading commitment, by the time I found it, that I broke because I didn’t care anymore! Wow!
I can’t even get past the sixth chapter of GRR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice first book. blech. His writing did not work for me at all.
I don’t know if this counts or is its own category, but Kim Harrison’s *Hollows *series is a series that I read first and then my wife picked it up and loved it. However, I didn’t. I tried them again for her but after getting halfway through book three, I had to stop. I just didn’t care about anyone or anything that was happening. I don’t know why for sure other than it didn’t work for me.
Those are the big ones for me.
I liked Ghost Story, though, as others have already said.
vislor
I was absolutely besotted with China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and really liked The Scar as well. IMO the rest is more uneven, but I’ve still got at least some - and often a lot of - enjoyment out of them, but I just really really didn’t like Un Lun Dun. I know it was written for young adults, but that’s not the problem, as I’m usually quite happy reading young adult fiction. But it was just all the puns, all the cleverness which resulted in flat characters that had nothing to do but wander being clever inventions. I think there was an UNbrella. Or something.wince
This is how I feel about Anne McCaffrey. Almost any series of hers that I have read has a great first novel, a good sequel, and then increasingly muddled and/or boring sequels. The Pern novels, The Ship Who Sang, Acorna, The Tower and the Hive series, all the same deal. The one exception (of the novels that I have read, at least) is the Crystal Singer series, but those novels are structured around a single protagonist, unlike the other ones I mentioned (and there are only three books).
My greatest disappointment was with the Tower and the Hive series. It was pretty good all the way to Damia’s Children, and then it suddenly got really boring. IIRC, the basic structure of the plot was: 1)Establish problem 2) have characters meet to discuss problem and formulate plan in intricate detail 3) immediate jump to aftermath where characters discuss how events went exactly as predicted with no surprises or revelations. The End. :smack:
Of course, I stopped reading all those series once they began to disappoint me, so I could be missing out on a reversal further on. I do try to be fair to authors, and she has given me many hours of delightful reading.
Douglas Adams, “Mostly Harmless.”
I love the first four Hitchhikers’ books and the Dirk Gently books. Mostly Harmless, however, felt like a book he didn’t want to write. It came off feeling like he was writing it because people were bugging him to write another one, and if he destroyed the universe and all possible alternate dimensions, then no one could bug him again.
(Turned out Eoin Colfer found some way around that ending to write a sixth book, but that one was terrible.)
Arthur C. Clarke–anything he did with Gentry Lee. From what I’ve seen those books are so bad that I can’t believe ACC really had anything to do with the actual writing of them. I’ve tried and failed to wade through a couple of them.
Isaac Asimov - I liked almost everything of his that I read - Foundation (even the ones from the 1980s), Robots series, the Empire books. But wow, what an unreadable slog Fantastic Voyage II was. That was his attempt to remake the original but with “good” science. Instead of the implausible Hollywood-junk-science but entertaining novelization he wrote back in the 1960s, we got a plot set-up, followed by a 100 page physics lecture (miniaturization is impossible because of Planck’s constant, but what if Planck’s constant was a variable?), followed by a 100 page microbiology lecture, followed by a few pages of plot resolution. Ironically, the last 30 pages or so (after they returned from being inside the body) was a pretty nifty Cold War thriller, but as a science fiction novel, the thing sucked.
I lost interest in Anne Rice’s Vampire books somewhere around “Vampire Armand”. Yeah, yeah, immortality is a bummer and you’re bi. Read it multiple times already.
I totally agree with the earlier comments on LeGuin’s Earthsea series. The original trilogy was brilliant. Tehanu was a Womens’ Studies 101 syllabus dropped into the middle of a plot outline (“Ged meets up with the girl from the second book, falls unconscious, lots and lots of yacking blah blah blah while he’s out, then he wakes up - the end. What’d I forget? Oh yeah, anything of interest actually happening”)
Ira Levin - Son of Rosemary. Yikes.
Not sure if this really fits, but I’ll throw Johnathan Kellerman into the mix. I’ve always enjoyed his crime novels. Last week, however, I listened to one of his books on tape. The book was* Evidence *although I’m fairly sure the actually title doesn’t matter.
Read aloud, the book is ridiculous. The dialogue is beyond crappy, and every single character speaks sounds the same, no character development.
I’m not sure he got worse or if the book’s flaws don’t hit you as you read it, but jump out at you when you listen to it.
For me, it’s Judith McNaught. She wrote a number of classic regency-style novels - Whitney, etc., and wrote a couple of very good novels with a contemporary setting. *Paradise *was particularly good. Sold millions, very popular “beach novels” back in the late 80s - early 90s.
Then, for some reason, in the late 90s, she started publishing books that had a mystery theme to them, and it just Did. Not. Work. with her writing style. But she kept on publishing them anyway. I think I remember reading her explanation that she wanted to write things she found interesting, and she was bored or unchallenged by her earlier writing efforts. Elsewhere I read that she’d gone through a bitter divorce recently and was having a hard time with writer’s block.
Reportedly, her next novel (2013, 2014, nobody seems to really know) is going to be her “big return” to the writing style she was so popular for, but who knows? She must be nearing retirement age, so it would be nice to see her go out on top.
I agree with Dave about latter Heinlein. I liked the first 4 or so james Patterson novels featuring Alex Cross, but then it seemed like he churned out a book every week, and all of them (OK, the few I read before giving up) were pretty craptastic.