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Crappy Best-Sellers.
Oct. 30th, 2001 12:24 pmI was looking through a second-hand stall on my way to the lab this morning, and noticed a couple of my All-Time Crappiest Novels on sale.
I owe a debt to these books. Good books inspire me and enrich my life, but they also make me feel inadequate. It's the badly-written books that encourage me. I read them, and think "I can do better than this. If somebody can present this to the reading public and feel no shame, why then should I be embarrassed by what I write?"
So, three of the worst. There are many bad books that sunk into the oblivion they deserved; those are too easy. I will restrict myself to those that were successes.
Patrick White, 'A Fringe of Leaves'.
I was forced to read this book for the HSC. I have never forgiven the Board of Examiners for that.
In this story, Mrs. Austin Roxburgh & her husband, who appear to lead a fairly joyless sex life together, sail to Australia to visit his brother, Garnett. While there, she and Garnett have a joyless sexual encounter. On their voyage back, they are shipwrecked on the coast of Queensland, and Austin is killed. Our heroine is captured by an Aboriginal tribe; among them is an escaped convict, with whom Mrs. Roxburgh has several joyless sexual encounters. He tells her about joyless sexual encounters from his past. Then she returns to civilization without him, and as the book ends she is apparently contemplating yet another joyless sexual encounter with somebody whose name I forget.
I was left with a profound feeling of "Why bother?" I can't recall ever reading anything as passionless as this book; while striving to be Literature it forgets to be Interesting.
And let's not forget the bird motif. All through this book, White throws in bird imagery. For no obvious reason, Mrs. Roxburgh becomes a green bird when she bonks her brother-in-law. Several more bird references for no obvious reason. And then, while she's travelling through the bush with the escaped convict, a reference to 'great grey birds', which sparked the following debate in my English class:
"So, what are these grey birds?"
"It's obvious. They're a metaphor, part of this weird bird thing White keeps doing."
"Nah. I reckon they're emus."
"Come on. He's been using metaphors all through the book."
"Yeah, but I still think they're emus."
"Metaphors."
"Emus."
"Metaphors!"
[sound of student turning page]
"It says here they kill one and eat it."
"Alright, they're emus. [pause] But I think they're metaphors too."
I have read worse books in my life, but none that I found less enjoyable. IMHO, the "life is so passionless you might as well kill yourself now" school of literature is highly overrated.
Robin Cook, 'Vector'.
Robin Cook is a doctor who writes medical thrillers. This one deals with an anthrax attack on New York City; I read it about a week before the first reports of anthrax in Florida, which is the sort of unfortunate coincidence that I encounter all too often.
On the plus side, Cook knows his medicine. On the negative side, he is completely unable to write plausible plots or dialogue.
In a city with 12 million residents, Our Hero runs into (literally) the Embittered Soviet Biotechnician Villain on his way to work. Then, when investigating a mysterious anthrax death, he bumps into said villain again, who's checking on the success of his test run. Then the Villain murders his own wife, whose brother is one of Our Hero's buddies, so Our Hero gets called on to investigate her death. Meanwhile, Our Hero's romantic interest is (a) investigating the murder of a skinhead informant whose white supremacist friends are in league with the Soviet Villain, and (b) engaged to an arms dealer who sells them AK-47s. (Apparently she never thought to ask him what he did for a living.) Somewhere along the way, the Villain helpfully mentions to Our Hero that he used to live in Sverdlovsk, center of the USSR's anthrax research program.
After all those helpful coincidences, plus a few more minor ones, any chimp could've figured out what was going on. But not our hero. No, he and the Romantic Interest show up at the Villain's place to warn him that he may be in danger, because his wife has somehow managed to eat enough botulin toxin to kill several thousand people. At this point the Villain apparently becomes fed up with their sheer stupidity, and locks them up at gunpoint after telling them the entire plan, except the bit which the author is reserving as an unexpected plot twist. (There being no in-character reason for the Villain to withhold this bit.) In the end disaster is averted by a fluke of good luck.
Now, dialogue. How often does someone engaged in casual conversation talk like this?
"The music of these groups reflects their neo-Viking ideology of hatred and xenophobia and a yearning to return to so-called 'traditional' forms of society." (Not an actual quote, but that's how he writes.)
Cook's characters talk like encyclopaedia references, not real people. In his bibliography he mentions a book on skinhead culture, noting that until he read this book he had no idea there was a difference between "skinheads, rockers, and punks". Which goes some way to explaining why every mention of skinhead ideology looks like it's been copied from an academic reference book, and why he identifies every skinhead in the book by having them listen to Skrewdriver.
Robert R. McCammon, 'The Wolf's Hour'.
I found this in a girlfriend's bookshelf, borrowed from a friend of hers. As far as I can tell, it was written to the following formula.
Look at the other best-sellers on the market. Figure out the standard ingredients that will guarantee you a best-seller: sex, violence, Nazis, germ warfare, a story that spans at least three countries, copious flashbacks, royalty, and the supernatural (in this case, werewolves.)* Spin this into a tightly-written, 200-page rollercoaster of breathtaking excitement; basically a James Bond film script with a werewolf and Nazis instead of Bond and Russkies.
Now take what you've written, and pad it out to 500 pages with purple prose and ludicrous plot twists. Oh, and add a sexual torture scene to titillate your readers - after all, you can always pretend you're just doing it to convey how bad the Nazis really are.
The story begins with Our Hero, who is a Werewolf, kicking Nazi butt in Africa in WWII. Then he goes on to kick Nazi butt in Europe during WWII. In the course of our copious flashbacks, we establish that he is the son of Rasputin and a Russian princess or something, the only member of the family to escape the Communists. Meanwhile the villainous Germans are massacring civilians in France and working on a flesh-eating plague to wipe out Britain. Our Hero gets involved with a beautiful woman who is, naturally, a spy for the Allies. He gets kidnapped and forced to run the gauntlet of a 'death train' too cheesy for a James Bond film; the designer of these deathtraps wasn't planning for a werewolf, which allows him to survive, although an ordinary human showing a modicum of intelligence would have done better still:
You are trying to find your way through a maze of razors in the dark. You have a jacket. Do you (a) rely on your supernatural powers of healing to get through, or (b) wrap the jacket around your hands and thus protect them while feeling your way ahead of you?
And so on, for five hundred pages, until mercifully the book ends. McCammon is a graduate of the "never use a single word where ten would do" school of writing, and brings us deathless prose like this:
"The bed had spoken for many men before, but never so eloquently."
One of his fans described him as "having done for werewolves what Anne Rice has done for vampires". To which I can but add, "only more so."
So... let's have your own picks for Crappy Best-Sellers.
I owe a debt to these books. Good books inspire me and enrich my life, but they also make me feel inadequate. It's the badly-written books that encourage me. I read them, and think "I can do better than this. If somebody can present this to the reading public and feel no shame, why then should I be embarrassed by what I write?"
So, three of the worst. There are many bad books that sunk into the oblivion they deserved; those are too easy. I will restrict myself to those that were successes.
Patrick White, 'A Fringe of Leaves'.
I was forced to read this book for the HSC. I have never forgiven the Board of Examiners for that.
In this story, Mrs. Austin Roxburgh & her husband, who appear to lead a fairly joyless sex life together, sail to Australia to visit his brother, Garnett. While there, she and Garnett have a joyless sexual encounter. On their voyage back, they are shipwrecked on the coast of Queensland, and Austin is killed. Our heroine is captured by an Aboriginal tribe; among them is an escaped convict, with whom Mrs. Roxburgh has several joyless sexual encounters. He tells her about joyless sexual encounters from his past. Then she returns to civilization without him, and as the book ends she is apparently contemplating yet another joyless sexual encounter with somebody whose name I forget.
I was left with a profound feeling of "Why bother?" I can't recall ever reading anything as passionless as this book; while striving to be Literature it forgets to be Interesting.
And let's not forget the bird motif. All through this book, White throws in bird imagery. For no obvious reason, Mrs. Roxburgh becomes a green bird when she bonks her brother-in-law. Several more bird references for no obvious reason. And then, while she's travelling through the bush with the escaped convict, a reference to 'great grey birds', which sparked the following debate in my English class:
"So, what are these grey birds?"
"It's obvious. They're a metaphor, part of this weird bird thing White keeps doing."
"Nah. I reckon they're emus."
"Come on. He's been using metaphors all through the book."
"Yeah, but I still think they're emus."
"Metaphors."
"Emus."
"Metaphors!"
[sound of student turning page]
"It says here they kill one and eat it."
"Alright, they're emus. [pause] But I think they're metaphors too."
I have read worse books in my life, but none that I found less enjoyable. IMHO, the "life is so passionless you might as well kill yourself now" school of literature is highly overrated.
Robin Cook, 'Vector'.
Robin Cook is a doctor who writes medical thrillers. This one deals with an anthrax attack on New York City; I read it about a week before the first reports of anthrax in Florida, which is the sort of unfortunate coincidence that I encounter all too often.
On the plus side, Cook knows his medicine. On the negative side, he is completely unable to write plausible plots or dialogue.
In a city with 12 million residents, Our Hero runs into (literally) the Embittered Soviet Biotechnician Villain on his way to work. Then, when investigating a mysterious anthrax death, he bumps into said villain again, who's checking on the success of his test run. Then the Villain murders his own wife, whose brother is one of Our Hero's buddies, so Our Hero gets called on to investigate her death. Meanwhile, Our Hero's romantic interest is (a) investigating the murder of a skinhead informant whose white supremacist friends are in league with the Soviet Villain, and (b) engaged to an arms dealer who sells them AK-47s. (Apparently she never thought to ask him what he did for a living.) Somewhere along the way, the Villain helpfully mentions to Our Hero that he used to live in Sverdlovsk, center of the USSR's anthrax research program.
After all those helpful coincidences, plus a few more minor ones, any chimp could've figured out what was going on. But not our hero. No, he and the Romantic Interest show up at the Villain's place to warn him that he may be in danger, because his wife has somehow managed to eat enough botulin toxin to kill several thousand people. At this point the Villain apparently becomes fed up with their sheer stupidity, and locks them up at gunpoint after telling them the entire plan, except the bit which the author is reserving as an unexpected plot twist. (There being no in-character reason for the Villain to withhold this bit.) In the end disaster is averted by a fluke of good luck.
Now, dialogue. How often does someone engaged in casual conversation talk like this?
"The music of these groups reflects their neo-Viking ideology of hatred and xenophobia and a yearning to return to so-called 'traditional' forms of society." (Not an actual quote, but that's how he writes.)
Cook's characters talk like encyclopaedia references, not real people. In his bibliography he mentions a book on skinhead culture, noting that until he read this book he had no idea there was a difference between "skinheads, rockers, and punks". Which goes some way to explaining why every mention of skinhead ideology looks like it's been copied from an academic reference book, and why he identifies every skinhead in the book by having them listen to Skrewdriver.
Robert R. McCammon, 'The Wolf's Hour'.
I found this in a girlfriend's bookshelf, borrowed from a friend of hers. As far as I can tell, it was written to the following formula.
Look at the other best-sellers on the market. Figure out the standard ingredients that will guarantee you a best-seller: sex, violence, Nazis, germ warfare, a story that spans at least three countries, copious flashbacks, royalty, and the supernatural (in this case, werewolves.)* Spin this into a tightly-written, 200-page rollercoaster of breathtaking excitement; basically a James Bond film script with a werewolf and Nazis instead of Bond and Russkies.
Now take what you've written, and pad it out to 500 pages with purple prose and ludicrous plot twists. Oh, and add a sexual torture scene to titillate your readers - after all, you can always pretend you're just doing it to convey how bad the Nazis really are.
The story begins with Our Hero, who is a Werewolf, kicking Nazi butt in Africa in WWII. Then he goes on to kick Nazi butt in Europe during WWII. In the course of our copious flashbacks, we establish that he is the son of Rasputin and a Russian princess or something, the only member of the family to escape the Communists. Meanwhile the villainous Germans are massacring civilians in France and working on a flesh-eating plague to wipe out Britain. Our Hero gets involved with a beautiful woman who is, naturally, a spy for the Allies. He gets kidnapped and forced to run the gauntlet of a 'death train' too cheesy for a James Bond film; the designer of these deathtraps wasn't planning for a werewolf, which allows him to survive, although an ordinary human showing a modicum of intelligence would have done better still:
You are trying to find your way through a maze of razors in the dark. You have a jacket. Do you (a) rely on your supernatural powers of healing to get through, or (b) wrap the jacket around your hands and thus protect them while feeling your way ahead of you?
And so on, for five hundred pages, until mercifully the book ends. McCammon is a graduate of the "never use a single word where ten would do" school of writing, and brings us deathless prose like this:
"The bed had spoken for many men before, but never so eloquently."
One of his fans described him as "having done for werewolves what Anne Rice has done for vampires". To which I can but add, "only more so."
So... let's have your own picks for Crappy Best-Sellers.
