Worst Books by Best Authors (Possible Spoilers)

In My Humble Opinion
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Let’s try again, if that’s ok with you, Mr. Hacker…

Many brilliant authors sometimes release work that is not up to their full potential. We all know that some books can be wonderful, while others are just ok. However, sometimes an author of incredible books releases an absolute stinker. Share with us your least favourite book by your most favourite author.

For me, it’s The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice. I really enjoyed all her other Vampire books, but Armand… well… bites. She’s taken her love of shocking people, and made that the whole goal of the book - to shock. Not to entertain, not to challenge, just to shock. The result is a book that is a waste of space, time and money. In MY humble opinion, it also took Anne Rice from slightly-kooky-good-author to try-hard-shock-author (that’s like a shock jock, but with pens and paper). If Armand had been the first book I’d ever read that was written by Anne Rice, I would never have read another of her books. As it is, she’s dropped from “Must Buy Upon Release” to “Must borrow from library before committing funds to purchasing”.

Share with us your disappointment in a favourite author who released a clunker of a book.

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King Lear. Far too long.

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The Vampire Armand was the first book I thought of when I saw the thread title. The book is beneath contempt.

I really liked Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the next few sequels. However, I thought that all the books after God Emperor of Dune were a complete waste of time.

I found much of Larry Niven’s work to be worth reading, but The Ringworld Engineers was so boring that I was unable to finish it. I’ve tried now on two occasions to read the whole thing, but have failed each time.

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cazzle I love spoilers. Would you be so kind and give me a plot summary(ending and all) of the novel? Also, is that one of the new “Vampire Chronicles” of Anne Rice? You know, the ones after the first four or five books(Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, and Mnemnoch the Devil).

I must say, Anne Rice is the author of one of the few books I can’t finish, Cry to Heaven. I stop reading it after they castrate the young guy. Depressing. She also had another lame books, at least for me. This are the second and third books of the Mayfair Witch chronicles. The first one was excellent, the second ok, but the third was unnecessary. The thing that has been the main point of the chronicles is finished at the end of the third novel.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Been warned! For the first 2 books, the point was not to let the Taltos mate (with humans or one another). At the end of the third book, that is exactly what happens. The reason for reading the books is finished. The ending is bad, in part because at the end of the second book they kill a silly, good-hearted female Taltos, but the female taltos of the third book, the one who finally copulates, is a wicked witch.

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My favorite novel is James Clavell’s first. I also loved Tai-Pan, Shogun, and Noble House. But Whirlwind, which earned him a then record breaking advance of $5,000,000, sucked. His next and last novel, Gai-Jin, was better than Whirlwind, but definitely not up to his earlier books.

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And your opinion of ‘King Rat’?

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Number of the Beast by Heinlein. Opening chapters were excellent: fast-paced, suspenseful, intellectually challenging.

Then about halfway through – and someone can correct me, but I think he suffered some serious health problems – the story came unmoored. The story changed into some ruminations on multiple dimentions with discussions of higher maths that went way over my head.

Sorry I can’t be more specific; it’s been decades. But I remember just how bad that was.

And now for something completely different: Outer Banks by Anne River Siddons (how’s that for a change of pace?)

For 9/10ths of the book, it’s a beautifully written story of four women’s friendship through the years. Lovely writing, very evocative.

At the very end (SPOILERS HERE), one of the characters suddenly goes beserk and tries to take out the other characters. Apparently, some long-plotted revenge plot had been sprung. In the last few pages, while a hurricane screamed outside their motel (where they had gathered for a reunion), she stalks them, but is eventually defeated.

Now, I can understand (sort of) why she went psycho on them. What really chapped me was that ARS couldn’t describe what was going on. I couldn’t figure out who went where and what happened. Now only did it stop the story stone dead – but I ended up parsing each sentence, thinking, “It had to be me. I missed something important. She couldn’t have fucked it up this bad.”

She did.

Third candidate: John Jakes. California Gold. His history of California as told by a hero who not only rose from poverty (a staple in books like these) but manages to get into every single big event in California history.

What particularly bit the big one was the climax. After battling it out with the villain for most of the book, they meet once again at the end, but the hero by that time was SO rich and SO powerful and SO handsome and SO strong, that the villain (instead of capping the sumbitch) slinks off without doing anything at all.

I mean nothing. Nada. Stares at the hero, realizes that he’s impotent before such magnificance, and gives up.

Yeeeech.

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“I Will Fear no Evil” by Robert A. Heinlein…the only one of his that I have not read more than once.

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I’ve always enjoyed Stephen King’s work, so I’ll be the first to weigh in on him; some of his books are great and some are not so great, but Insomnia was a waste of trees.

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Well, I wouldn’t call Dick Francis a great author, but he’s a usually competent mystery writer. But his last book, Shattered, was just phoned in. Utterly senseless plot, and the “hero” keeps putting himself in danger when a simple phone call to the cops would have sufficed.

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RickJay is right. Insomnia sucked big time. Pericles is Shakespeare’s worst.

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Hey, King Lear is my favorite.

Heinlein’s first book after undergoing the operation to clear up the blood flow to his brain was Friday. The quality of Friday compared to the three or four before it defiitely shows. IIRC, he was in too poor health to actively edit the books he wrote in the 70s, thus they were released overlong, unpolished.

Sir Rhosis

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King Lear is great. It’s certainly better than “The Winter’s Tale” or “Coriolanus”.

“Brazil” by John Updike must be a contender.

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That was bad enough, but have you read Up Island? That started out terrific (I loved how the protagonist’s MIL was allied with her in the divorce, scorning her son who she apparently always knew was a jerk). But why did her friend start being a snatch to her so abruptly? And what kind of ending was that? IIRC, there was no resolution at all. The disabled guy went on being a prick, and she stared out at the sea. She didn’t even have an emotional closure; I think protagonist was still depressed even in the last paragraph.

Haven’t read any of her stuff past that. For my money, nothing can top Downtown or Fault Lines.

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Terry Goodkind: Soul of the Fire

What a disappointment! Most of the story involves different people in a different place doing different things - it hardly involves Richard and Kahlan at all!

Then there’s the really lame lame lame excuse for Zedd to continue not getting around to teaching Richard how to use his magic. And the whole thing about some stupid words making them suspicious of lies, while other even stupider words being accepted as part of the Lore.

Complete bollocks. No more Goodkind for me.

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Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

I like most King, but these - well, I read the blurb on the back, skimmed a little, just couldn’t do it.

And I gave up on Hearts in Atlantis when, not very far in, it was revealed to be a Dark Tower tie-in. Ugh!

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Piers Anthony’s **But What of Earth?{/b}. After he wrote it, it was edited and patched up by another writer, and it was really bad. He got mad about it, and then released his own, unedited version, and it was still really bad.

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Neidhart, only the first of the four sections of Hearts in Atlantis was a Dark Tower tie-in. The rest of the sections are about men whose lives are intertwined in important ways with Carol’s. That being said, it’s still not a very good book.

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Oh, Lord, Downtown, her fictionalized memoir of growing up in Atlanta in the '50s and '60s (can’t remember which) and encountering the Negro Problem.

This was especially baaaaad. One scene still burns in my memory of this young girl, in her first year of college, going with her friends to visit a convention of black disc jockeys to interview someone for her campus newspaper. They drive out to what, they discover, is the seediest area of town (this is in segregation days, remember, so hotels that could cater to blacks were usually found there). Inside, they try to find the guy and encounter a) pot-smoking; b) scenes of illict sex; and c) funky music. And her character seems to breeze through it like a chaste Little Annie Fanny (e.g., impervious to the whole scene). And no one thought it unusual to see a white girl obviously out of her league wandering through the motel.

I’m afraid I may not have conveyed accurately the tone of this scene, so please forgive me. It just seemed so earnest in intention and so bizarre in effect. Siddons was basing a lot of the book on her days in Atlanta, and it really didn’t come off well at all.

Her first book was still the best, “The House Next Door,” which Stephen King not only praised, but went into great detail over in “Danse Macabe.”

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**

1967-9.

**

I think you’ve crossbred Downtown with Heartbreak Hotel. HH was the one about the girl in her last year of college, seeing a black man being arrested and writing an editorial about her empathy. She was naive, but she was young enough to be.

The scene in Downtown wasn’t quite what you said. She was 26 and working for a magazine (called Downtown) in Atlanta; that’s what the interview was for. The desk clerk refused to let her in at first, and the residents sure thought it was “unusual” for her to be there.

What I disliked about that scene was the aftermath: the photographer got a photo of a (large) black woman threatening her, and her screaming in defense. The one and only time she could be percieved as another of the cracker trash she was trying to rise above, and it gets a two-page layout in Life magazine.