I hate books that I pick up at an antiquarian event which have a spring-loaded needle in the cover. Now, I know the poison has usually evaporated off or is otherwise decayed to the point of being ineffective, but is is still annoying to trigger a cleverly hidden death trap when i was just hoping to read the collected journals of an Illumianti chapter.
And don’t get me started on the dart throwing mechanisms. Really.
I really enjoy Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels, but after reading a few of them I got very adept at spotting his “character isn’t who you think he is” habit. Rhyme is trying to track down a hit man, say; meanwhile, several chapters are dedicated to the activities of someone we’re meant to think is that hit man – but it turns out he’s not. The real hit man is this other guy who’s been under our nose the whole time. Do this once, and it’s clever. Do it in every book you write, and it gets tedious.
In one of his books, there were two different characters who in the end turned out to be the same guy. Try working that twist into the movie adaptation!
One of the few books I was forced to read in High School that I actually liked was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Not only is it written in present tense, but each chapter shifts the first-person POV to a different character! The chapter titles are the character’s names, so you know who’s speaking. Sounds like that would drive a lot of you batty, but I thought it was brilliant.
I do love a juicy Hollywood biography, cheezy or not. But I skip right over the first biographical chapter and get right to the “…and that was when I decided an actor’s life was for me! I got started by…”. (There are exceptions, Michael Caine’s autobiography is a real doorstop of a book but I found it all well written and interesting.)
You never saw Fight Club?
Spoilers, dude! I mean, I watched that movie less than three years ago and went in totally unspoiled, so there are still people who don’t know!
Here’s one I’ve noticed lately. It’s the practice of imparting important plot information to the protagonist by means of some vaguely supernatural, poorly characterized force. You know, “when she spotted the mysterious stranger, she was overcome by an instant feeling of dread,” thus informing her that he’s a Bad Guy. Or “I don’t know why, but I’m certain that we need to head west”.
Like many entries here, when it’s done properly, it can add to an atmosphere of mystery. Stephen King does this a lot, and he often manages to do it right. However, it can just as easily be the result of lazy, lazy writing. A lot of times, it’s “I can’t be bothered to figure out a logical way for my character to learn something important, so I’ll just say that they know it ‘somehow’”. I was reading something not long ago that did a TON of this, but now I can’t put my finger on what it was.
I guess I just remembered it from somewhere.
You silly. 
Not really the same thing. Two key characters throughout the narrative were Joe, the kindly shopkeeper, and George, the evil mob lord (names and occupations changed, and title of book withheld :)). I felt it was a bit of a cheat to hide the fact that, hey, by the way, Joe and George look exactly alike!
Anyway, I was actually OK with that particular twist, and a sharp-eyed reader might realize that no characters had interacted with both Joe and George until the reveal. I just thought it was a good example of Deaver’s propensity for this sort of thing, taken to the extreme.
Oh hells yes - this.
It seems to be more of a British/female writer thing. I prefer the mystery genre, but there are some authors I just cannot read any more of because there’s a new character introduced every few pages.
The other mechanism I’ve come to hate is when in the course of a series, the author brings in a new character who is pretty much the protagonist redone. Often, it seems, this character is brought in to do things that are somewhat morally questionable, so that the original character can keep his hands clean. I’m thinking of Hawk in the Spenser books, and Nate Romanowski in the CJ Box series with Joe Pickett as the protagonist.
These two characters also represent another peeve of mine - the characters who appear to have no lives other than to come in and protect the loved ones of the protagonist when they are under threat but where the story requires them to go elsewhere.
These characters are often depicted as infallible as well, which becomes annoying. Once you have infallibility, you need some kind of kryptonite plot device to allow for dramatic things to happen.
Dragging in cancer to kill off a character that the author doesn’t seem to know what to do with.
Really.
(Thank you.)
No. You cannot dis Hawk. Aside from being impossibly cool, he is the most perfectly moral character in the books; everyone else is encumbered by ethics.
Besides, he was a part of the series from the beginning, wasn’t he?
Marcia Muller in her Sharon McCone mystery series did this a lot. There was one that involved illegal immigrants being smuggled into the US by means of a tunnel, and Bad Guys around somewhere, and Sharon “just knew” where they were lurking so she could go the other way or sneak up on 'em, something like that. Another one had her and her Romance Hero Significant Other flying (in their own plane) from Florida back home to San Francisco, convinced that the Bad Guys would be waiting for them at almost any of the airports they might be stopping at, but Sharon Just Knew which airport WOULDN’T be being observed–and get this, she was right!!!
I don’t know whether the books still have this particular “mechanism”; I gave up on the series a ways back. Anyway, maybe this was it?
Yes, but that was non-fiction. Robert van Gulick wrote a mystery in which it was obvious who the murderer was, if any murders had been committed, which was unclear. There were no marks on the bodies, apparently, after all.
So, what was the book named? The Chinese Nail Murders .
Gee, thanks.
I hate it when the heroine is “perfect” she pretty, smart, rich, kind, strong, giving, affectionate, composed, brave, graceful, preppy but can rough it etc . COME ON, MAKE THIS PERSON HUMAN.
Love triangles.
John Scalzi refers to names like this as “typewriter spasms”.
Oh god yes- Anne Rice and the word ‘preternatural’ springs to mind for this, yes, we get that you’re using a nice long word and we’re all jolly impressed, but you do not have to shoehorn it in 5 times a chapter.
In kids’ books, the disappearing parent syndrome used to bug me a lot- not just kids being orphaned, but the ones who weren’t had parents who always seemed to be suddenly called away by mystery illnesses or just for no real reason leave a bunch of kids with some batty old distant relative or total stranger for a month who just left them all to do whatever, despite being otherwise being portrayed as loving, caring parents.
I hate the age-old mechanic of “men want sex, women want marriage”. So you get these prim women that look down on their men for natural urges, even while they love them. It makes all women seem like sex is just the price we pay to be married. Some of us want it more than the men do.
I can’t believe there was a fucking monster at the end of The Monster at the End of this Book.
Not only that there was ANOTHER monster at the end of Another Monster at the End of This Book, too
My mother’s cousin wrote a book of short stories. They were pretty good, but I think she used the word “furze” on three separate occasions, which struck me as way, way above the usual frequency.