I had shot Scott Bradley an email asking him for some suggestions for terrible reading. After all, I thrive on reading crap just as much as I do really good stuff. A great novel will wow me, humble me, whereas something loathesomely bad actually gives me hope in my own writing. I think that's the value of reading -- to be humbled and emboldened at the same time. So, I approach writing I dislike with a rather clinical attitude -- as like: why I do hate this so much? What is this writer doing that's irritating me?

Anyhow, Scott thought my initial advice seeking would make for a good thread discussion and possible POH review sub-segment. So, that being said, I place this question to all POH hosts and listeners alike: What is the worst book you've ever read? and why do you dislike it so much? Be constructive. Saying "Charles L. Harness makes me fume with violent dispair. Somebody should beat up the editor at DAW who paid him" doesn't really say much about the art of fiction.

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Interesting question, but I'm not sure I can answer it. I'm more forgiving with lousy movies because they only take up a couple hours, whereas a book takes what, somewhere between 8 and 20 hours of reading time. That's a pretty large chunk of my life to spend on something I'm not enjoying. Although, I'm really only forgiving with movies that are supposed to be bad, like Killer Shrews or Tarantula and whatnot. I was pretty freaking pissed that I spent 2.5 hours of my life and $8 on the third Matrix movie, which I felt was pure garbage.

I see your point about reading poor books to boost your self esteem (or "embolden" yourself, as you put it), but I don't know if I could invest that kind of time just for a creative boost. If I find a book to be THAT bad, I probably won't finish it. My biggest gripe with most "bad books" that I've encountered has to be either rotten dialogue or horrible characterization. Usually if I finish a book and one of these things bugged me, it was more of a bad portion of the book, and not that the whole book was bad.

I'll try to come up with some books that I actually finished that I thought sucked. Let's see how many I can actually come up with.

The Mountains of Madness - Hugh B. Cave
I'd never read any Cave before, but heard some great things about him, so I was pretty excited to read this book. I was wildly disappointed. The story seemed pretty disjointed, and the characters weren't very well developed. The characters that were involved weren't very likable. That's something I think is vital to the success of a book. If I don't care about the characters, I become detached from the story and I don't care what happens. Then I don't feel the tension, and the purpose of the book is lost. I found out later that this was one of the last things Cave wrote before he died at the ripe old age of around 187, and it's a pretty short novella, so these factors might have played a large part in the poor characterization.

Weed Species by Jack Ketchum
Strangely enough, another Cemetery Dance title. I loved the artwork and expected a monster story. After reading Off Season and The Crossings, I thought Ketchum could do no wrong. I was way off. Talk about unlikable characters! I'm not sure where Ketchum was trying to go with this, but it was more like a series of events involving some plain-old detestable people, not really a cohesive story. The characters were wildly unlikable, and I found myself just not giving a crap what happened next. When you find yourself just not wanting to turn the page, you know you've got a bad book in your hands.

They Thirst by Robert McCammon
I was so thoroughly disgusted with the ending to this book that I have vowed to never read (or spend a penny on) another Robert McCammon book so long as I live. I have always had a thing for vampires. This book had the city of LA (I think it was LA) totally overrun by vampires to the point that all the normal humans left were totally f*cked. I kept thinking, "Oh boy, I can't wait to see how he gets them out of this one!" He had me seriously hooked. Then when he got everyone out of the mess, I was astounded...and not in a good way. He totally pulled one of those completely unexpected bullshit "act of god" tidal wave things out of his ass and literally washed away all the vampires at the last second. I thought it was a total cop out and felt my time reading the book was wasted. It was like he was saying, "sorry reader who plopped down $4, I just couldn't be bothered to come up with anything original, so here's a cheap and sleazy ending." I felt used.

Flesh Gothic by Ed Lee
I wouldn't say that I disliked this book, but I felt his storytelling style was a bit flowery for my taste (Slither was MUCH better). Yeah, I know the book is rife with butchery and graphic sex, but the dude goes on about cornices and lattices and all sorts of inane, unnecessary descriptions about furniture and moldings and other assorted details about the house. Instead of saying something like, "it was a gothic, 17th century, viking doorway with auburn oak trim" and letting us draw our own mental picture, he goes on for like three pages describing the wood grain, the hue and luminosity of the stain, the fourteen chips in the hand-molded facade, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we're reading an Ed Lee book, for crying out loud. We're there for the grue, we don't give a flying flip about the damn doorway. Give us a cursory description, let us visualize it the way we want to, then walk us through the damn thing to the naked chick in the torture harness doing it with a hatchet-wielding demon. That's what we came to the party for, Ed!

Wow, I guess that was a little easier than I thought. I still hold to my initial thought that a bad book only angers me and makes me feel my time was wasted, though. Unlike a "good bad movie," I don't think there's such a thing (at least for me) as a "good bad novel." There's just too much time to invest in something I'm ultimately not going to enjoy.

Now, I can totally identify with your point substituting bad short stories for bad novels. I haven't listened to The Late Late Show podcast in a while, but it floors me how they can be so hit or miss with their fiction. They've had some great stuff (Mark's "Mrs. Sniffles" was great as was Jeff Parrish's "Damn Strange"), but then they've had some real crap, too. I'll listen to horrible short stories with bad dialogue, horrible characterization, and terrible story lines, and it makes me feel much better about anything I do. I haven't written any fiction in years, but I write instructional content on a daily basis, which sometimes includes video skits and examples, so I can definitely apply the concept to my work.

I'm not sure if I answered your question or I just babbled on for way too long. Either way, I hope it helps.

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I'm with Kreep on the idea that I generally won't finish a book that I dislike that much. But here are the bottom three novels that I have ever read (I actually keep all the ones I've read on a shelf and rank them in order of how I well liked them. I know it's kind of sad, isn't it.).

3rd worst- Ghost by Noel Hynd- I realize that alot of people liked this book, but I just didn't find it that scary. The back of the book promised alot that the story failed to deliver on, in my opinion. It's been many years since I read it, but I just remember being very disappointed with it.

2nd Worst- Ghost Mansion by J.N. Williamson- Let me start off by saying I have alot of respect for the late J.N. Williamson, but this book was just too depressing from beginning to end. There should be an occasional light at the end of the tunnel in any story but this one seemed to be missing that.

#1 Worst- The Place by T.M. Wright- This is the only book of his that I have ever read and most likey, will ever read. It focused too much on the characters at the expense of the plot. From the back cover I thought it was going to deal more with an external evil force effecting a troubled girl's imaginary world that she invented for herself. It sounded like a cool concept to me, but only a couple of pages of the book covered this. If you are selling a book based on supernatural events but really only want to write about character interaction, then don't sell the book for its supernatural content. It wastes my time as a reader!

In the end though, they are all published authors, and I am not, so I don't believe that I can write better than them. They have all had sucess, so they are obviously doing something right. I just didn't care for these three novels. I did complete them though, that means that they had to have kept my interest at least a little bit or I would have given up on them after the first hundred pages (as I did with Bag of Bones by Stephen King).

I find it fascinating though, about how our sensibilites and what have-you dictate what is bad and what isn't. Matt, for example, doesn't think that characterizations shouldn't be done at the expense of plot. I tend to believe the opposite, but I'm not one to downplay or denegrade somebody else's reading experiences. I mean, I'm perfectly aware that what I beleive is Crap, like some of James A. Moore's writing, is perfectly entertaining to others. Though we may disagree, I find the "why" fascinating. Which leads me to a point:

I don't think "I'm better" than some published authors. I find myself reading books I dislike because they enable me to think about fiction and writing structurally. Take three books I read recently that I liked a whole lot: Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough, Berserk by Tim Lebbon, and Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez. I enjoyed those books, "got sucked in" by them where I wasn't really paying attention to the writing, but more to how much fun I was having.

i had to claw my way through James A. Moore's "Rabid Growth" because not only did I think it sucked, but because I wanted to understand what he was doing, on the page, that irritated me so much. It's easier to reflect on things you didn't enjoy than the ones you did. That's why I beleive reading clunkers has merit.

Anyway, enough. I've been drinking wine.

rich

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I don't think that charactization is bad, I just don't want to read a book where that is all it's about. I like a book to have both good characters and a good plot. The book I was talking about was mostly about the characters and their was next to no plot that I could make out. I only read supernatural horror. If a book is low on the supernatural, then I am completely uninterested in reading it. I picked up that book because of its supposed supernatural content and kept reading it, thinking it was going to come up soon. To me, it never did. If they had marketed it as a book about a troubled girl with a big imagination, I never would have bought it to read. For me plot is the most important aspect of any story.

Wow - this thread has already gotten WAYYYYYYYY too involved (in a good way, I assure you!) for me to properly address on my POH #30 segment...SO...what I'm going to do is read Rich's original email, throw in a few comments of my own, then direct listeners to this board/thread.

In other words - KEEP POSTING, this stuff is AWESOME, but it ain't gonna get read on the air this time.

Cool?

SB

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Ken

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Ken

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I recently bailed on The Stake by Laymon. Nothing really happened.

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