Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. How to write long sentences of meandering complexities, a dozen (With entire sentences randomly interrupting said sentences within brackets of such length that you’ve forgotten what the original sentence was about by the time you get back to it.) sub clauses and multiple quotes from different characters arranged in such a way you can’t tell who is saying what, orphaned phrases tagged on the end that don’t seem to belong there.
Oh, and everything by Ian Rankin. Cliché piled on cliché topped by a trite cherry.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Fretful Porpentine *
**
<Heels of hands against temples> Make it stop! Make it sto-op!
For the record, I rather enjoyed Four Past Midnight. 3/4 of it, anyway. Or 5/8. So is that Two and a Half Past Midnight?
Maybe Stephen King has produced some frighteningly horrible lines, but Tommyknockers and Needful Things remain my two favorite horror novels. So there.
I read some book in the seventh grade, called the Sea (something; I forget the rest of the title). It ripped off from Tom Clancy (another overrated writer) so many times that it made me wretch. It was about… guess what? A renegade submarine that is nearly completely silent, and therefore, very dangerous. The writer used every plot crutch possible. The Two Submarines in Tense Staring Contest crutch. The Nifty Equipment to Please the Gun Nuts crutch. He even added the Mandatory Sex Scene crutch to spice things up a bit. Deus ex machina? Yep, I think there was, but I stopped reading after page 200-something.
He even said, on the cover, ‘written in the style of Tom Clancy’…
<wiping tears of slightly hysterical laughter from face>
Man, I may have to try that argument on my advisor next time she tells me I should be cloning more than twice a week. I will point out that it would be wrong to stunt the development of today’s primitive sheep.
I actually kind of envy those of you who get to grade essays–there’s at least a little entertainment value there. Try grading exams for an animal sciences class. It’s funny the first few times somebody tries to tell you a typical chicken wieghs thirty pounds. But after a while, you start to regret being a part of the human race.
I forgave it all until book N.
Where the character claimed to only use Hellman’s Mayonaisse. No other mayo would do.
Which might be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that there’s no such thing as Hellman’s on the west coast (where the character has lived all her life). That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
(Plus constantly referring to character’s friend who (at the height and weight given by Grafton) would have been a size 6 as fat. That pissed me off to no end.)
Besides the Doctor Who books, I’ve also read a couple of Dennis Wheatleys.
(“Gosh, Steve, you do read a lot of rubbish.” Yeah. You got a problem with that?)
The Haunting of Toby Jugg is one that sticks in the memory for all the wrong reasons. (I paid 5p for it at a church jumble sale - took it home, read it, decided I’d been robbed.) Sensitive aristocratic young hero is helpless in the clutches of evil Jewish Communist black magicians (think about that one, but not too hard), who are trying either to corrupt him with Vile Sensual Pleasures, or to drive him mad by frightening him with an enormous conjured spider demon.
The book has many points of interest for connoisseurs of bad writing - for example, the scene where the chief Jewish Communist black magician explains how an underling, who has failed to seduce Our Hero, has been shipped back to Russia for punishment disguised as a crate of bananas. However, it’s the giant spider that does it for me. I’m quite an arachnophobe, and have been known to scream like a little girl at quite ordinary spiders - but even I, who can barely look at the things, know that spiders are arachnids, not insects, and have eight legs, not six.
The novelization of ‘Total Recall’ by Piers Anthony was unusually horrible. Unusual despite the fact that (A) novelizations almost always suck and (B) stuff by Piers Anthony almost always sucks.
I TRIED to read a biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu (I believe it was titled ‘The Maker of Modern Japan’ or something similar) and could not get past the constant grammatical mistakes. I’d say a good 2/3 of the sentences I read were either badly put-together run-on sentences or sentence fragments. I can get past bad grammar alone, but there were many points where I could not figure out what the author was trying to say because of them.
Oh yeah, another good one is ‘The Legacy of Heorot’ by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. Now, I’m a big fan of Larry Niven, and like everything I’ve read by Pournelle, but this book had some horrible writing in it. One example I can think of is a point where the omniscient third-person narration describes something as (and I’m not getting this exactly right) ‘an orgy of murder’ and then later on the same page one of the characters describes it with the EXACT SAME PHRASE. Now, this may have been partially due to having multiple authors working on the project, but this should have been caught in early proofreadings.
Yes!! I read, and finished because I just felt I had to see what exactly went down, Kiss the Girls. And here I was thinking that this book would be ultra-disturbing. Everyone who saw me reading it said it was wonderful, etc…even my fave English teacher, whose fave books include A Tale of Two Cities, loved Along Came A Spider.
Ahh. I HATED that main character, he was so goddamned self-righteous. I utterly detested all these self-assured, self-confident women that get kidnapped. It was way too good vs. evil for me. The serial killers were cartoonishly bad. It was as if Patterson was making an oversimplified Thomas Harris novel, only in Harris’s novels, the serial killers are at least identifiable with. Here, I just wanted them all to die, die, die. Even though I was sure they would all come out all right in the end. The only thing disturbing was how saccharine sweet it was all- do the right thing and all that crap. Icky, icky stuff.
Anything by Dean Koontz. The women are always conveniently sterile, obviating the need for birth control, and the protagonists are always independently wealthy, so working for a living never gets in the way of the “plot”. The monster is always a big mutant dog-headed thing with lots of teeth. And he gets obsessed with a word like “preternatural”, and repeats it on every other page.
Amanda Cross. Her “we are so witty, so sophisticated, and we pity those poor people who live across the Hudson” drek makes me want to hurl. “Those rednecks out West actually think we want to come and take their property.” Right.
I just read Murder in the Smithsonian by Margaret Truman. That’s right, Harry’s daughter. Don’t blame me, it was on the back of the toilet in my SO’s house. Don’t blame her, she lives in DC, where apparently Ms. Truman is loved and respected.
This book was terribly wonderful. The names, oh dear sweet Jesus the names. The moth-eaten stock characters. The “insights” into the labrynthine, time-wasting social structure of our nation’s capital seen through the eyes of a child of priveledge who was obviously kept as far from the true workings of the town as possible.
I agree on Dean Koontz and James Patterson. For extreme pain, try to read his latest “romance” book, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas. Lord did I groan.
After enjoying Lonesome Dove, I have tried to read other Larry McMurtry books. Good lord. I wanted to drop to my knees and scream and beg for some character development and plot. Which is almost like groaning, right?
Dean Koontz’s Phantoms was the most awful book I ever read. I finished it on the Chicago El, got off at my stop, and threw the copy onto the rails.
And I’d agree that the prose in The Firm is monumentally bad. I remember that “‘Yes,’ she said, agreeing with him” sentence and how it made me retch.
There was also a sentence along the lines of “Sitting there at the table, he felt exactly as he would feel as if he was the dinner fork sitting there on the table at that moment.”
I, too, wondered whether anyone actually sat down and edited that book. And if they had, what were they sitting on–a spike?
But I also graded freshmen English 15 papers for three years. Don’t talk to me about bad until you’ve encountered a student plagiarizing another student who got an F.
I worked for about four years for an imprint in the Children’s Books Division of a major publisher. This was in the early 90s, before the children’s book industry hit a major meltdown, and it still held onto the somewhat antiquated but nonetheless charming tradition of accepting unsolicited manuscripts (known in the industry as “slush”). We read them, too, and actually found one or two submissions worth publishing.
But the bulk of them were unreadable. If they weren’t trite, overused themes tackled with no imagination, they were hackneyed rhymes (why do people think every picture book has to rhyme?) or talking animal stories. The editorial assistant at another imprint told me whenever one of the slush submitters called re: their manuscript, she automatically asked, “Oh, is that the one about the Spunky Squirrel?” Usually, the caller answered, “Why, yes, it is,” pleased that it had made such a big impression :rolleyes:.
Maybe this thread was devoted to actual published dreck, but since I’ve seen a couple of teachers talk about student essays, I thought I’d add my two cents about slush submitted to children’s book publishers. Dismal stuff.
