I’ve just finished reading Morrissey’s novel “List of the Lost”. It’s the worst book I’ve ever read by an absolute mile, and it’s been mercilessly (and deservedly) slated in the British press. In fact, it’s so bad, it’s actually kind of good. It’s entertaining, just for all the wrong reasons, like “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. I persevered with it purely to see just how atrocious it would get. Spoiler alert: Very.
To give you a rough idea of how bad it is, the Daily Telegraph put together a little list of the 10 worst lines, here. Here’s my favourite:
And yes, ‘Bulbous salutation’ and ‘Otherwise central zone’ are exactly what you think they are.
The whole book is like this. There’s no way Morrissey could have gotten this published if he weren’t already famous. Anyway, it got me thinking, who really is the worst published author writing today? Is Morrissey really as bad as they come? Or is there someone even more awful? Please substantiate your nominations with direct quotes. I could do with a laugh
The Guardian gives out an annual Bad Sex Award for the worst sex scene in works of good fiction. Obviously Morrissey wanted to win that and gave it his all.
To my mind, the real noteworthy question would be, who is the best-selling really bad writer?
Ordinary bad writers? You can find tons of 'em self-publishing on Amazon, or at the various sharing boards. Go to Reddit and you can find some of the worst prose imaginable.
But when you get million-copy sellers like R.A. Salvatore and John Jakes – who can’t write for puke! – that’s astonishing.
Dan Brown came up with some cool/interesting themes, but his actual prose is god-awful. He seemed to just throw in terms at random without knowing what they meant. For example:
If the guy is in silhouette, how the hell can the guy see the color of his skin, hair and eyes?
Or stuff that was just plain incorrect:
The Rio de la Plata, located in the Old World region of… South America?
I might suggest the author of 50 Shades but I think that a little unfair. She wrote fan-fic that ended up getting published. Others don’t have a problem trashing her, though.
Oh God. Oh my God. That list. I had read the ‘bulbous salutation’ line quoted somewhere, but I thought that was the book’s pinnacle of flamboyant badness (actually, I thought it was probably the English language’s pinnacle of badness) and the rest of it presumably sucked but in a pedestrian way. I never dreamed that MORE OF IT could be JUST AS BAD.
I can’t…I mean, I came into this thread with ideas in my head. Books that I was considering. And now that list has just blown everything else away.
My God. It’s like the nuclear bomb of literary Dunning-Krugerdom.
Anybody who expects Dan Brown to be factually accurate is sort of missing the point. His books require at least as much suspension of belief as any movie ever made.
Reads to me like Mozza has been a little too liberal with his use of the thesaurus. It really does read like he wrote a perfectly ordinary sentence and then pressed some sort of auto-synonymiser to try and make it all a ‘bit’ more flowery. Most fiction writers grow out of this with experience, most not being unlucky enough to have their first efforts published…
A year or so back I watched a movie based on a Dean Koontz novel.
By the way, Odd Thomas is a very underrated light horror flick. I recommend it.
So, I remembered reading a couple Koontz paperbacks back when I was a teenager. Something about a cop chasing a voodoo killer and something else about a freakshow. I remembered being somewhat annoyed at the books and never reading anything by him again. But not exactly the specific reasons why. So I went and downloaded the second Odd Thomas novel.
It was- Well- it was quite an experience. Imagine grampa Simpson trying to write an horror book. It basically consisted of a couple of paragraphs describing an action by the aforementioned Thomas, and then two pages of old geezer rantings.
“Odd Thomas went inside the abandoned casino. Nobody saw him enter. But if somebody had, they wouldn’t have stopped him, since his conservative hairstyle and clothes allowed him to pass for somebody doing an inspection. Not like kids today, with their piercings and tatoos and be-bop music, who should absolutely keep off the lawn of hard working writers”
