Worst Books You Have Ever Read

Sometimes you get the sense that some people become writers not because they have this burning desire to express themselves, but because they simply want to impress the local yokels. A number of years ago while at work at Barnes & Noble my ears were taken hostage by a classic rock lovin' Robert Parker readin' middle-aged ex-hippie/acid burnout who was there looking for books on how to get published. He ranted and raved for 10 minutes about his book idea for a private eye crime novel (which he had even had copyrighted in the Library of Congress back in 2004), and I had the hardest time keeping a straight face during his monologue: it was obvious he was in love with this book idea of his, but the idea was so cliché and commonplace (in the realm of mystery novels), that it was hard to take him seriously, and I got the impression he was extremely delusional. He was especially pleased with the "unique" name of his main character, which was (are you ready for this?): Eddie James. Thomas Pynchon has nothing to worry about.

Anyway, on the night of July 17th last year, he turned up again on a quiet night, and the first thing he asked me was if we had a special section of the store set up for people published through iUniverse (which was hilarious in and of itself). When I replied in the negative (which seemed to surprise him), he had me look up a book title and an author name in our database. This book title (The Case of the En-Slaved Souls) turned out to be a book that he had written and had self-published that month, the very same idea he had told me about all those years ago (maybe he didn't think I believed him because he also took out his driver's license to show me his name). He even said to me, "Bet you didn't expect to come in here and meet a published writer today, did you?" I should have said, "Bitch, please, I am a published writer." Hell, probably 50% of my friends are writers, ha ha.

Here's his Twitter account, where he does nothing but talk about his shitty self-published book. Recently he's been boasting about how some website both reviewed his book and held an interview with him. I looked up the site and it's one of those deals where if you pay the site $49 or so they'll both review your book (the review is completely generic: "The writing style is simple, but hides powerful emotions and storyline. If you are looking for an exciting read, this is a perfect choice.") and also interview you (and the questions are painfully vague and boilerplate).

https://twitter.com/jbeksha

Here's the book's page on Amazon (you will observe the book's back cover description is full of typos and not even proofread, though that's nothing compared to the text inside the book):

http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Of-En-Slaved-Souls/dp/1491770880

(Even funnier was how cheesy the cover art was, though I guess it was still better than his original idea, something about a lady in a bikini wearing handcuffs, but his iUniverse consultant mercifully talked him out of that one, claiming people might mistake it for pornography. Yes, he told me all that).

Oh, so now you're curious as to what the text inside the book is like? Well, you might want to gird your loins first, but here goes:

https://books.google.com/books?id=t...onepage&q=case of the en-slaved souls&f=false

And remember: this 148 page opus took him nearly 25 years to produce! I mean, I know the guy has ADD, but so does Quentin Tarantino, so that's no excuse!
 
I think I feel more comfortable criticising cosy established writers than struggling people who had the courage to put something out there as their one shot, even if it is terrible and the writer sounds like a narcissist. I have no idea how one goes about being published. Too timid. Respect to those who take the plunge, as my tales shall never be read at this rate.

My criticism of that guy's prose would be that it seems like he has never read a book, which could actually be liberating when it comes to his use of narrative. One of my favourite weird fiction novels is William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. Much of the writing is bafflingly poor; however, because Hodgson seems to have no real awareness of how books are agreed to be written, it frees him up to explore some very interesting vistas indeed.
 
MTC said:
The Peripheral by William Gibson was just not very good. I do have fond memories of reading the Neuromancer trilogy back in the 90s. Don't think the recent book is in any way comparable. A waste of time (travel).
Click to expand...

That's a shame. I finished Neuromancer recently and found it some of the most stylistically sophisticated SF I've ever read; where did it go wrong for you?
 
It's monotonous, and abstract in the sense that most concepts are only vaguely defined (I suppose you could argue this is what makes it sophisticated). Basically I just never got interested in any of the characters which feel and act like cardboard figures.

I read the book simultaneously with Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which is of course something completely different but - I would say - so much more profound.
 
Just read X's for Eyes by Laird Barron. Worst book in recent years. The gap in quality between his shorter fiction and his "novels" is mind-boggling. Who is the impersonator that writes novels under that name?

The premise read more like a comic book than a novel (and I wouldn't have minded it in a comic book). The dialogue was stilted, and the British seem awkward and forced. The whole fantasy of near-omnipotent characters is highly annoying. And I honestly never found out, what the nonsensical plot was really about - an initiation rite of sorts? For no apparent reason at all? Ugh. Worse than The Light is the Darkness and its David Icke-isms and bloodsports arenas where power and royalty meet to watch people die in one of the worst attempts of social criticism in a novel I've ever encountered.

Love the short story collections, though.
 
CS Lewis, Mere Christianity; rarely have I felt my intelligence so insulted by a book. Also, Brian Lumley's lovecraftian Titus Crow novels, which make Derleth's pastiches seem like Ligotti in comparison. There was also a Resident Evil book I read as a high school freshman which even back then struck me as being singularly crummy; Caliban Cove, I believe it was called.

(For the record, I too read X's for Eyes a couple months back and thoroughly enjoyed it, but c'est la vie. . .)
 
Frater_Tsalal said:
Oh, so now you're curious as to what the text inside the book is like? Well, you might want to gird your loins first, but here goes:

https://books.google.com/books?id=tQAvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT1&lpg=PT1&dq=case+of+the+en-slaved+souls&source=bl&ots=xmQ1dFSVcF&sig=9Vg_lZdg_QPCwkuYS47pcA-YR8E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWnoD6u9fLAhUN92MKHZSbC_EQ6AEIRjAK#v=onepage&q=case%20of%20the%20en-slaved%20souls&f=false

And remember: this 148 page opus took him nearly 25 years to produce! I mean, I know the guy has ADD, but so does Quentin Tarantino, so that's no excuse!
Click to expand...


When I read that she gave up her father's defense codes from the DOD due to 12 hours of intense tickle torture something broke inside, and limped away, shrieking. I believe that it was my soul.
 
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie was another one I loathed. Its use of symbolism I remember as seeming made to impress the reader with its cleverness - and make the reader feel very, very clever because the reader is able to get it, simultaneously talking down to the reader and trying to appear cleverer than it is while appealing to the readers' vanity. Something I find to be a problem in much contemporary "literary fiction". Relatively obvious metaphors, relatively obvious allegories masquerading as deep; the equivalent of memes positing to say deep thoughts. Mediocre writers masquerading as real literature.

Of course, Midnight's Children is a better novel than I give it credit for, but it was here I first encountered that tendency permeating a book, thus this book becomes a stand in for a tendency I dislike a great deal.
 
I also greatly disliked China Miévile's new novella This Census-Taker . It read like half-baked Bruno Schulz fanfiction with absolutely wasted attempts at surrealism and a sloppy Deus Ex Machina ending. I usually admire the writings of Miévile but he just wasted his time on this release. Hopefully he redeems himself with The Last Days of New Paris due out in August.
 
RE: Moon People, I gotta say I almost wanted to cheer the author on. There's a story he wants to tell, so he sits down and tells it. For eighty pages. That's no mean feat. And every "on writing" book/essay/interview I've ever read by established authors has emphasized above all else that good writing is only possible through plenty of reading and plenty of practice. So, good on this guy...

...until I see how much his book costs! C'mon. I don't begrudge his writing a less-than-stellar book. But how about a little humility?
 
MadsPLP said:
Something I find to be a problem in much contemporary "literary fiction". Relatively obvious metaphors, relatively obvious allegories masquerading as deep; the equivalent of memes positing to say deep thoughts. Mediocre writers masquerading as real literature.
Click to expand...

Well, seeing that we have ACTUAL SCHOOLS AND PROGRAMS instructing people to do this, are you really surprised? First step is to purge the academics and creative writing professors. Make them do manual labor instead - then they will get in shape and be healthy enough to do original writing rather than scamming the youths and hanging out in the tenured lounge or whatever.
 
Justin Isis said:
MadsPLP said:
Something I find to be a problem in much contemporary "literary fiction". Relatively obvious metaphors, relatively obvious allegories masquerading as deep; the equivalent of memes positing to say deep thoughts. Mediocre writers masquerading as real literature.
Click to expand...

Well, seeing that we have ACTUAL SCHOOLS AND PROGRAMS instructing people to do this, are you really surprised? First step is to purge the academics and creative writing professors. Make them do manual labor instead - then they will get in shape and be healthy enough to do original writing rather than scamming the youths and hanging out in the tenured lounge or whatever.
Click to expand...
This. I can't say anything about experiences with an American post-secondary creative writing program (yet), but my high-school creative writing class was one of the worst experiences academic experiences I've ever had. Indeed, we had (meager) instruction in basic variants of poetry, but when we got into prose it all went to hell. We were bade to write a horror tale that was synced to bad sound bytes on an awful iPad app. All of these pieces were terrible. Plus the original teacher left in the middle of the semester and was replaced by a clueless, condescending woman who did utterly nothing in terms of advancing our literary education. At least I had the opportunity to write a bad historical fiction about Albert Fish for my final exam. A few people actually left the room during the reading XD
 
One of the worst I've ever read was "Carrion Comfort" by Dan Simmons; but worse than his book was the introduction, in which he literally portrays his agent as one of the "vampires" in his book.
 
teguififthzeal said:
One of the worst I've ever read was "Carrion Comfort" by Dan Simmons.
Click to expand...

That's unfortunate, I loved it, did you read the novella first? hope you did not wade through the whole novel if you did not enjoy it.

If anybody is undecided, I strongly recommend trying the Novella - essentially an early chapter of the whole novel first - it is in one of the Jones Years Best Horrors I think - to see if you will enjoy or are prepared to invest in the book - and if you are still unsure, or decide it is not for you, maybe skip ahead to the chess game ;)
 
As Robert pointed out, I have already talked about this in some other posts, but I wanted to do this in a more thorough way. This took forever, but here it is: Supergods by Grant Morrison:

There are many reasons why I hate this book, but I will say that it is very reader-friendly and some parts of it can be really engaging, fox example when the origins of the superheroes, the Silver Age, the emergence of Image Comics or Morrison's experiences in Tibet are discussed. Now, the reasons I profoundly dislike it:

First, the book's subtitle is What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants and a Sun God From Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, although the subtitle Our World in the Age of the Superhero is used in some editions. If someone was expecting anything like this, they would be sorely disappointed, since the only chapter dealing with the subject is the last one and not in any deep way; it just mentions how technological progress is moving humanity closer to the superhero ideal Morrison says he believes in.

Second, the book says "Supergods is your defnitive guide to the world of the superheroes", when it does not mention Will Eisner's or Mike Mignola's contributions to the genre. It also has a jumbled chronology and, if any uninformed readers happen to read the book, they would think Morrison's lauded All-Star Superman was published after his Final Crisis disaster.

Third, the book seems intent on subtly bashing Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Mark Millar. For example, he calls Moore's Supreme a "pastiche", while forgetting to mention its Silver Age influences are pretty much the same than All-Star Superman, which was published nine years after Supreme. Morrison also takes a not so subtle potshot at Moore, without mentioning him:

"I chose to see some writers as missionaries who attempted to impose their own values and preconceptions on cultures they considered inferior—in this case, that of the superheroes. Missionaries liked to humiliate the natives by pointing out their gauche customs and colorfully frank traditional dress. They bullied defenseless fantasy characters into leather trench coats and nervous breakdowns and left formerly carefree fictional communities in a state of crushing self-doubt and dereliction.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, surrendered themselves to foreign cultures. They weren’t afraid to go native or look foolish. They came and they departed with respect and in the interests of mutual understanding. Naturally, I wanted to be an anthropologist."

It all seems part of Morrison's long lasting campaign against Moore, which started with Morrison's columns in the fanzine Speakeasy and included him saying to Rolling Stone in 2011 that Moore is obsessed with rape. It seems he forgot to mention the instances of rape in his own comics, for example in his short story zzzzenith.com, published in 2000AD Prog 2001, where rape is played for laughs; it features Britney Spears after being sexually assaulted, if anyone is interested.

Lastly, Moore affirmed that he recomended Morrison to Karen Berger in the 1980s, and Morrison took issue with that, but Berger confirmed this in the documentary Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD, released in 2014.

He asserts that Gaiman's Coraline was influenced by Lucy Lane Clifford's The New Mother, a tale he brought to Gaiman's attention. Also, he says Millar's first success was Wanted, when Millar had spent years on the spotlight for his superhero work by the time Wanted was published.

According to Morrison, he has great fans, polite and intelligent, which does not happen to be the case with all of comics' fandom. This is what he has to say about Gaiman's fans:

"These physical marvels tended to heave into view like stricken Zeppelins cradling grotesque homemade Sandman dolls—imagine a cutout of Neil Gaiman’s face pinned to a boxing nun hand puppet or adorned with a crown of pressed black roses. But they were essentially kind souls and more or less harmless, like news reports of disasters on the other side of the world."

That is a very mean spirited and hateful thing to say, no matter which way you cut it.

Fourth and worst of all, Supergods whitewashes the suffering Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster went through at DC Comics after creating Superman:

"If you listen to the right voices, you’ll hear and believe what I heard and believed growing up in this business, and it won’t be long before a dark and evil fairy tale unfolds: the grim cautionary fable of two innocent seventeen-year-old boys seduced by the forked tongues of cartoon fat-cat capitalists and top-hatted bloodsuckers. In this Hollywood tragedy, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are depicted as doe-eyed ingénues in a world of razor-toothed predators.

The truth, as ever, is less dramatic. The deal was done in 1938, before Superman boomed. Siegel and Shuster were both twenty-three when they sold the copyright to Superman. They had worked together for several years in the cutthroat world of pulp periodical publishing, and, like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers, they were creating a product to sell. Superman was a foot in the door, a potential break that might put them in demand as big-time pop content providers. Superman was a sacrifice to the gods of commercial success. If my own understanding of the creative mind carries any weight, I’d suspect that both Siegel and Shuster imagined they’d create other, better characters."

After this, Morrison shows some kind of glee in the fact that Siegel and Shuster never created anything as successful as Superman was while also damning them with faint praise saying they were "perfectly well-conceived characters." He also mentions that in 1975 Siegel and Shuster started receiving a $20,000 per year compensation, but, since the comics industry has improved, a writer can make that amount in a week, which is a monstrous comparison. He even deals with the issue in a wax poetical way:

"Irony, the cosmic 'stuff' of which it often seems our lives are secretly woven, had the perfect man in its sights all along. And so it came to pass that our socialist, utopian, humanist hero was slowly transformed into a marketing tool, a patriotic stooge, and, worse: the betrayer of his own creators. Leaving his fathers far behind on the doomed planet Poverty, the Superman, with his immediate need to be real, flew into the hands of anyone who could afford to hire him."

This is pretty insulting, since a few paragraphs before he basically blamed Siegel and Shuster for their predicament and it only adds fuel to the fire.

In an interview with Comic Book Resources to promote the book, Morrison said he could not talk about how Siegel and Shuster were screwed since it was a deal that was done before he was even born, which is a horrible answer, but still better than what he wrote in his book, which goes overboard in its sucking up to his corporate masters, while also publicizing Morrison's then impending run on Action Comics.

What is also disappointing is that what I consider Morrison's most interesting work is barely talked about, like The Filth, Flex Mentallo or We3, among others.

All in all, the book is a pretty self-aggrandizing affair, with Morrison bent on glorifying himself at the expense of almost everyone else. He even accepted an MBE, for crying out loud.


Some links of interest:

4thletter! t believe you, you need more people

4thletter! t

Grant Morrison Explores | Comic Book Resources

The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, As Told By Grant Morrison — The Beat

Grant Morrison Is Wrong about Alan Moore

Every Day Is Like Wednesday: Some lame things Grant Morrison said in public a while back, which are even lamer in context

Who is Grant Morrison anyway? | My Little Underground

Grant Morrison: Why Im stepping away from superheroes

Grant Morrison | PAUL GRAVETT

Grant Morrison on the Death of Comics | Rolling Stone

Last Alan Moore Interview? | Pádraig Ó Méalóid AKA Slovobooks

How photogenic we all were | Suggested For Mature Readers

http://www.tcj.com/cloud-cover/

http://www.tcj.com/flex-mentallo-and-the-morrison-problem/

http://www.tcj.com/things-dont-look-so-bright-and-chummy-round-here/

http://www.tcj.com/this-week-in-comics-72711-traditions-continue/

Supergods was super lame | this cage is worms
 
Last edited:
I haven't read it either so I might be wrong. But I remember in SF:UK years ago seeing what looked like a Dan Dare parody in which he is raped by Mekons. Which seems like an ideal illustration of a decadent version of an old fashioned comic. Again, there might be more to it than that.
 
Has anyone mentioned Left Behind? Don't ask me why I read it. I could sound high-minded and say I was trying to get a sense of the zeitgeist of an important American subculture. Perhaps I was just in a masochistic mood. It was as bad as you could imagine. And it made millions.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top