I’m not quite sure, but I think the builders started building it but stopped at some point in time.
I’d say it’s about half-finished, or half-unfinished, depending on your point of view.
An Engineer would say that construction had been suspended until additional funds could be found.
Here is a writer who plays the game of beating a dead horse … for keeps!
I wonder if they ever finished that keep?
Several days. A lot of the bones were exposed because of vultures and other carrion-eaters.
I thought vultures fed on dead animals, not crows.
Ha!
I saw what you did there…
Yes, Robin Cook. I once read one of his/her (not sure) books. I think it was on an airplane or something.
For a long time I was convinced that I knew who the worst writer ever published was. I think Cook is worse than Brown. Close call, I know, but I vote for Cook.
I mean, not only the sentences, but just everything. Descriptions of things that were physically impossible. I have a vague memory of some guy in a parking lot hearing something that indicated that his female co-conspirator/girlfriend/whatever was about to be punched, and leaping from his car and running up three flights of stairs to save her, and getting there before the punch landed.
From Barbara Kinsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.
The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation.
[Sound of needle being dragged across record]
Actually, that’s rather awful. I guess it’s * technically* accurate to say that the dead are unconscious, but it would be a stronger sentence if you omitted the word. If fact, even if cliched, “slept like the dead” would be even more powerful.
And, while I’m not a forensic pathologist, there probably wouldn’t be much bone bleaching going on until a few days later after the vultures and random predators had had their fill. So if you want a morbid image – use that one.
Not seeing what’s wrong with that.
Juxtaposing compression and bowstrings. It’s an awkward simile at a critical moment in the book. The image of hearts being fired like projectiles. Melville could pull it off because it was buried in a book that was buried in a book that was grandiose. Kingsolver doesn’t have the chops for it.
Mostly, though, I suppose it’s that she’s trying so hard. I think that well written books should feel effortless. The next sentence should feel inevitable, like it was the only sentence that could be there or was always there. That isn’t the feel that I get from this at all.
Or Hell, maybe I just don’t like her writing…
See, if I had to pick at it, I’d pick at the idea of the bodies as bowstrings firing off the heart. It’s giving me a small identity crisis: are the girls the bodies or the hearts?
Compressed and drawn (like a bowstring) aren’t quite in accord, but the sentence didn’t scream FAIL like some of the others in the thread.
From War of the Worlds:
His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.
That’s bad timing, not bad writing. 
And sometimes even good writing falls victim to poorly placed punctuation:
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oblong Box” (1850)
He felt he had to keep going.
Now that may be a totally ludicrous simile. And yet, somehow, I find it quite delightful at the same time…
I think I’d have to read that one in context to pass judgment. It could be that’s the only thing we need to know about it!