Gaston Leroux’s “Le fantom de l’Opera” is pretty unreadable. But I hear the story has made tons of money. Same with Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”
I like William Martin as an author. He’s sort of the Boston James Michener…you know, he’ll trace a family from colonial times to today, and I really like his books. But he can’t write endings. He’ll be going on at a nice clip, pulling you into the story. Then you hit the last chapter, and it just ends, abruptly, without making sense. It’s as if he was just writing until he reached his page length, then he ends with something on the order of “and then everyone died. The end.”
Heh heh heh, Victor Hugo. I can’t decide whether his style can be removed from the story or not; it just gets so goddamned pretentious sometimes:
Stuff like that. You just want to slap the author and tell him to snap out of it. How on earth does it matter here what some poet or other said about the sun?
The comments about Neil Gaiman…they wound me!
The best characters come from the most dreadful writers:
Sherlock Holmes
Tarzan
Fu Manchu
James Bond
I guess they’re archetypes because they’re two-dimensional. I just wish more literary heavyweights would dabble in some of these characters (Are the John Gardner Bond books any good?).
Doc Savage was a pretty decent character, but I think Robeson got five bucks every time he threw in the term “piano wire chest.”
Wasn’t Frankenstein written for a holiday contest, and thus created a little hurriedly (or at least under less than normal circumstances)? True, even then they had editing and rewriting, but still…
I believe that the original story that Frankenstein comes from was written for a little competition among her circle of friends, but the actual novel was written later.
I actually enjoyed the prose in it.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Well, for the most part it’s okay for its time but I gave up at a point where I couldn’t stand the writing. It’s not far after the first part with Johnathan Harker. There’s a newspaper article in it that describes a ship, and the writing is so dry and dull that I gave up on the book there.
I normally really live Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, but the first few pages of “The Fall of the House of Usher” have several sentences that are utterly terrible. They are long and have tons of commas and are needlessly complex. I find that type of writing confusing, and don’t really understand it unless I read it sort of backwards.
The Scarlet Letter. I don’t remember the author, but I couldn’t stand the prose. I like the theme quite a bit, though I do think the author got carried away with the symbolism.
I’m 23, but just last year I got caught up in the Dragonlance fantasy novels. (I haven’t read the whole setting or anything, just the two main trilogy collections by Margaret Weis and Tracy Chapman.) They’re written for young adults, so it’s not surprising that there’s plenty to be desired in the writing.
The stories, however, are quite amazing. I would love to see them as films, but there’s no way that they would be any good without a LotR-trilogy-sized budget. Mr. Frail is going for a Master’s in Creative Writing and thinks that the brilliance of the narrative is unintentional. How’s that for “crappy writing, great story?”
I’ve never even considered the question.
I mean, I figured that if I liked the story enough to finish it, then I must have enjoyed the writing.
Hawthorne. I’m guessing by the “carried away with the symbolism” that you’re not familiar with the rest of his works. He’s about as subtle as a sledge-hammer to the head and he has absolutely no self-control when it comes to symbolism. See The Minister’s Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown.
I love him dearly.
“The Search for the Green River Killer” is the most poorly written book on which I’ve ever wasted $5.95.
There were countless typos, verb splits, tense disagreements, and about 30 pages in, I realized the author had spelled a sheriff’s name THREE DIFFERENT WAYS.
Sad. Truly sad. The editor (if there was one) should be shot. Immediately. In front of his/her peers. Without a cigarette or a last wish.
And no blindfold.
The most-read version of Frankenstein is the Third Edition, written 15-20 years after that famous night at Byron’s villa. Mary Shelley, kind of the Courtney Love of her era, used the bulk of her literary powers rewriting that book several times. She wrote a couple other novels, including Walpera, but few modern readers have read them.
You want to read something hacked out overnight? Dr. Polidari’s contribution to that same contest, “The Vampire,” survives in some form or another. Well, I don’t think he had a literary reputation to protect.
How is Tolkien a bad writer?
Likewise, how can you accuse Philip K. Dick of bad writing when, to my knowledge, he deliberately wrote in monotone in order to let the extravagant and ridiculous developments in his fiction take over? I find his style is almost hypnotically effective.
I remember Dragonlance. Highly entertaining, although I get the impression that what the writers started out with a D&D game as inspiration but never played it to the end. I say this because some of the plot seemed painfully contrived: that whole part towards the end with the half-elf and his dragon-riding girlfriend made me want to throw up. With a host of interesting characters to chooe from – even the good ones that haven’t been killed or revealed to be supreme beings, they have to zoom in on the blandest (Tanis) and the most two-dimensional (Kit or Kittie or whatever is the name of that cardboard cut-out) in the entire story. The series is certainly not a masterpiece of the English language, but it is actually better written than a lot of fantasy out there (admittedly, that is not saying much). I too have always thought they would make good movies, given a few important fixes.
Stephen Donaldson uses language that has been described as elephantine. Although it is in some parts quite clumsy, overall it fits very well the high degree of introspection and character analysis, and is probably the reason why some people are so disturbed by the hero they actually want to kill him. Without Donaldson’s extravagantly overdone penmanship and his inimitable diction, the series would probably be an abysmally boring exercise, rather like some heavy pieces of Russian literature.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote a good story in an absolutely appalling manner in Last of the Mohicans. Samuel Clemens’s essay on Cooper’s literary offences is definitely worth reading – rarely has a writer been thus panned by another.
So you have plodding prose and dull characters for, say, 3,000 pages, and then it starts getting interesting?
Wow. She’s like the Bizarro Robert Jordan.
I have always been a big fan of fantasy novel involving people from the current period of time entering lands of wizards and warriors. Since I first found such novels, and the concept of Magical Realism" in entertainment. I have read each example I can find. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I heard the plots to some Dean Kuntz novel… I mean, they all apeared to be about real people dealing with bizarre events, which like M.Night Shyamalan did a pretty good job of in unbreakable . (and not much else.)
Alien invasion, being trapped in an otherwise deserted office building with a serial killer, Calvin and Hobbes being a real life story, with the tiger being real, and protecting you from harm, etc. Then I actually read the books. ::Where’s the puking smiley?::He can write in such a way that I can envision the scenes, but the men all seem the same, and it seems so depressing.
I remember a discussion about Philip K Dick–perhaps on NPR many years ago. Apparently, he only had an editor for only 2 books: The Man in the High Castle & another whose name escapes me. Inhabitants of the SF ghetto got no respect in those days; Kurt Vonnegut escaped but memorialized them with his tales of Kilgore Trout.
Yes, Dick’s work needed editing–but it was not available to writers of cheap paperbacks. I’d still rather re-read one of his weird adventures than plunge into the overheated, overgrown prose of editor-disdaining Anne Rice.