Happy to help anyone dodge the dreaded Lehane bullet. I forgot to mention the only thing that makes his writing worse is that he’s so damn successful at it.
My mother reads a lot of mysteries. Or I should say, she allows her eyes to rest on them - she somehow manages to read these books without ever allowing any of the content into her brain. Which makes her recommendations a bit - unreliable. I have become something of a mini-specialist in Bad Mystery Writing as a result.
Patterson is bad, yes, Grisham is bad, certainly, but you people are missing one of the worst cases of Bestseller Badness of all time: Lillian Jackson Braun. Her books are miracles. They have no plot, no characters, no style, no writing, and two cats, and they sell (well, sold - don’t know if they’re still popular) like mad. My LO and I tortured ourselves all the way through one of LJB’s books - I think it was The Cat Who Jumped Up and Down and Begged to Be Put Out of His Misery - and it was one of the most heinous reading experiences of my life. And I say this as someone who used to have to read freshman psychology students’ essays.
In the Less Well Known Category of Profound Awfulness, I give you Harry Stephen Keeler. He is so bad he’s good. A quote, taken from that link (for obvious reasons, it’s hard to get your hands on a Keeler):
It doesn’t get more awful than that, folks, and he was published.
Ah, but reading without laughing is only the Lower Level of Argon Mastery. The Exalted Level is to be able to read it while sucking helium without laughing.
If you go here you’ll find a full MST3K treatment.
Without a doubt, the worst book I’ve read in many a moon had to be ‘Hannibal’, by Thomas Harris. What a piece of garbage! And coming from an author that we all know can do so much better-it’s truly sad. I skipped many, many pages of that book.
It’s obvious Harris wrote this book either as a contractual obligation or strictly to hang a movie sequel on, or both. It feels like a screenplay, not a novel. And the characters seem to be totally different people who just have happen to have the same names as his previous characters.
It stinks!
Once, I wrote a half-page sentance that was perfectly correct, grammatically speaking. The teacher wouldn’t accept it, though.
I add my vote to the Dean Koontz/James Patterson category.
Dean Koontz makes my teeth hurt.
I am currently slogging through “The Rift” by Walter J. Williams.
I am 145 pages in and I still don’t give a flying feck about any of the so-called “main characters”. These characters are so dull and jaw-droppingly sterotypical it just amazes me that this book made it to print.
Throw in some completely gratuitious and not very interesting sex scenes and some mind-numbing earthquake facts and statistics every few pages, and I’m ready to throw this book in the trash.
Goodwill is too good for the likes of it.
Bleech.
It was an awesome movie though 
You guys have Koontz characters all wrong!
I got the recurring characters nailed down:
The Man: Ex-military, or ex-cop (Dark Rivers of the Heart). Or ex-Delta Force (Watchers).
The Woman: Traumatic childhood, but slowly recovering into a strong self-assured woman. (Demon Seed, Lightening, Whispers, I could go on and on and on)
The Villain: He’s repeated the villain from Whispers, his first, many, many, many times (That One With The Guy and The Kid Going Across The Country Pursued By A Madman, The One With The Private Detectives And The Guy That Could Teleport, Face of Fear, and so on). Quick description: 6 foot 3, weight lifters build, eats like a horse, blonde, blue eyes, crazy, rapist.
The Sex Scene: Koontz doesn’t write random sex scenes. Everyone who has sex in a Koontz novel is deeply in love. A “feeling of two beings becoming one” is often discovered, because of the deepness of the connection. See every Koontz book ever.
The Super-Intelligent Dog: See Watchers, Fear Nothing (And it’s sequel), That One With The Technologically Enhanced Town, etc. Koontz is, apparently, a dog lover.
The Geek Corrupted By Power: Night Terror and The Aforementioned Technologically Enhanced Town, especially.
I’ve read them all folks. And for some reason, I love 'em. shrug What can I say? I know it’s the same book over and over again. The titles all run together, unfortunately. But dammit, it’s a book I like!
I can’t remember the name of the book, but the first two lines made me groan out loud. I knew from that point that it was going to be a baaaaaaaad book. I was right.
“Murder and cooking don’t mix. Unfortunately I learned this while hosting a TV cooking show”.
I swear I didn’t make that up. Worst opening sentences EVER.
Mmwhah ha ha ha ha HAH!
FINE submissions, all. Many OBVIOUS and GENERAL examples of prose gone sour. Yet none of you have delved into that most atrocious slime-ball of Meritless Potification that lies, like a reeking beached whale, in the literary sub-genre of Famous People Who Write Illustrated Children’s Books For No Damn Good Reason.
I give you: former ex-President Jimmy Carter and daughter Amy’s straight-off-the-presses-and-bound-for-the-remaindered-booksellers’ – “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”
I’m paraphrasing, but I believe the FIRST line goes: “There once was a brave little crippled boy named Jeremy who loved his mother very much…”
Makes you wanna bitch-slap some sense into Jimmy, eh?
Uh… gotta go. Secret Service van just pulled up. MAN, people have NO sense of humor this close to 9.11.
I’m curious… If you found the first Grisham book you read/heard so awful, why did you read another one?
BTW, what’s a deus ex machina? Is that the argument of God acting in strange ways? Or God not acting at all? Or…
- Wind
Oh, I forgot to give my vote!
It is hard, but I’m going to go with The Temptation of Elminster, which is in the Forgotten Realms world, if any of you have heard of it. Elminster is the big bad Gandalf-like figure in this world, and Ed Greenwood’s series chronicles his rise to power. If only Ed could write! I’ve never seen anyone depict great swords and sorcery battles so badly. Elminster just acted as if he were invincible, and gosh darn, who wouldn’t be with a goddess there to save or ressurect your sorry behind every time you act like a bumbling idiot 
Of course, Elminster and the goddess are the only characters that endure, as the book just cuts from one adventure to another without end, with all of the miscellaneous characters being stereotypes of this D&D inspired world. Not even developed stereotypical characters, for they all disappear within a chapter or two. And Elminster is just about the most boring character in the world, and the somewhat provacative title belies the fact that Elminster and temptation did not even enter the same room together…
Most books I’ve read have had a decent aspect to them. Badly written books usually have halfway interesting plots and/or action. This book had neither. Bad characters, bad prose, flatly serialized story, no emotional involvement at all.
It was not even bad enough to be entertainingly bad, like some of the examples you folks have mentioned. The Firm by John Grisham is a masterpiece compared to this book…
- Wind
I absolutely must provide a link to one of my favorite places on the whole web, here:
(sorry, I don’t know how to do the clever linking-without-entering-the-address thing)
The Bulwer Lytton Fiction contest is an opportunity to write as horribly as possible, and the results are always a riot. This site also includes a “Sticks and Stones” section for mockery of published work - a lot like this thread. It’s well worth a peek.
The Bulwer-Lytton site also links to the singularly repugnant, but very amusing, Eye of Argon, mentioned above.
I… don’t get it? What’s bad about this piece of prose?
And who DARES suggest thet the mighty Peirs Anthony writes ANYTHING bad, EVER?!?! You shall pay , HERETIC!
The Sticks and Stones section is wonderful. It begins with a splendidly inept sentence from Danielle Steele’s Star:
and also includes the majestic
from Adeline Dutton Whitney’s Faith Gartney’s Girlhood.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I submit William Shatner’s Tek series.
To be fair, I only read the first couple chapters of the first book.
On the other hand, you don’t have to eat the whole apple to know it’s rotten.
One of my colleagues claims to have come across a student essay that began, "Since the dawn of time, the Japanese have been looked upon by their neighbors as a genetically gentle and peaceful race."
Oh my… I had a friend in college who did a whole series of paintings on the “use” of Korean women during the war.
I see DAVEW0071
I see DAVEW0071 beat me to the children’s book slush pile, but I assure you some imprints (mine for instance) still accept and read slush. We get together, order a pizza, and read them aloud to each other. It gives a truly frightening picture of the literacy of the nation, more appalling in a way than even college essays, because these are all manuscripts from people who consider themselves writers. (And many are librarians and teachers.) One of my favorites:
The hare is bare
and that’s unfair.
Prepare to share
your underwear.
Another recent gem gave a vivid depiction of what a banana feels like as its skin is peeled off. It was enough to turn anyone into a flesh-eater.
Well, the first one I read was actually The Pelican Brief, whic wasn’t all that bad. Not laugh-out-loud-and-wonder-how-this-got-past-the-editors bad, anyway. Then I listened to the audiobook of The Firm, which was bad, but could have been an aberration. Then I read The Rainmaker, which was ended up being flung across the room with great force and convinced me that any flaws in Grisham’s other writing were no aberration.