Thread: The Hall of Shame

So, tell us: what's the worst fiction book you've ever read? What made it so bad?

I hereby nominate Debbie Macomber's A Good Yarn, which wasn't. My girlfriend made me read it all the way through, and that was hard. It's leaky plotwise, populated by characters with less personality than cigar store Indians, written with all of the panache of a flattened souffle, and at 352 pages is about 351 pages too long. Even worse, it's part of a series.

James Patterson's Hide and Seek is among the most prominent pieces of literary manure I've ever read.

Oh, and of course there's Twilight.

What made Hide and Seek so bad, Sam?

"Not to butt in," he said, as he did, "but the fact it was by Patterson is reason enough."

Recently? The Frozen Circle ~ Peter Watt. An excellent idea for a story, completely ruined by the lack of a single contraction in all 467 or 420 pages depending on which edition you read.

Um, I'll come back. I posted in the wrong thread.

I know this is probably a bit obvious, but the Inhertance Cycle by CP. Star Wars with 2D dwarves.

Originally Posted by The Backward OX

"Not to butt in," he said, as he did, "but the fact it was by Patterson is reason enough."

"Not to be any more of a contrarian than usual," he retorted, "but I've never read anything by James Patterson. Not that I'm especially curious, otherwise I would have, but what's so bad?"

Originally Posted by moderan

What made Hide and Seek so bad, Sam?

Patterson's first books, Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls, were the beginning of a series about a psychologist called Alex Cross and were hailed as the best psychological thrillers since Harris' The Silence of the Lambs.

1996's Hide and Seek, however, was a stand-alone about a successful musician, Maggie Bradford, and had the tag-line: "Maggie Bradford is one of the most beloved singer/songwriters anywhere. She's also the devoted mother of two children. She seems to have it all. And so, how could she have murdered not just one, but two of her husbands? With unrelenting suspense, James Patterson answers that question".

Unrelenting suspense my arse. The book starts off in first-person narrative with a flashback to Bradford killing her abusive first husband. Then, for the following three-quarters of the novel, Patterson goes into a monotonous screed about how she now has the perfect life, has sold millions of albums, and is dating the most glamorous athlete in the world. It started slow and it never picked up pace from there. I kept reading because I thought it had to get better, but the ending was clichéd, the writing flat, and the characters underdeveloped. Compared to the page-turning Along Came the Spider, this book nearly put me off Patterson for good.

Didn't the second one (Kiss the Girls) become a film? Pretty sure I've seen that. I've seen the books on the stands, but they don't interest me at all. I only picked up SotL because I had read Black Sunday years earlier and enjoyed that.
I have a buncha Michael Slade books, which seem more-or-less similar in approach. They're compulsively readable but not so great if you think about them. Really well-researched though.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard.

Yes, it's fiction.

It's so bad because, well, damn.

Yes. Hubbard was a decent sf writer way back when though.

Originally Posted by moderan

Yes. Hubbard was a decent sf writer way back when though.

The only other one of his that I've started to read was Battlefield Earth, but it was so execrable that I only managed the first fifty pages or so. Which of his titles was actually decent?

Originally Posted by moderan

Didn't the second one (Kiss the Girls) become a film? Pretty sure I've seen that. I've seen the books on the stands, but they don't interest me at all. I only picked up SotL because I had read Black Sunday years earlier and enjoyed that.
I have a buncha Michael Slade books, which seem more-or-less similar in approach. They're compulsively readable but not so great if you think about them. Really well-researched though.

I think both of them became films.

Will have to check out the Slade guy. Never heard of him.