Demon’s Door

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by Graham Masterson
2010 Severn House Publishers

First sentence: He tried to shut the front door really quickly so that Tibbles wouldn’t escape, but as usual Tibbles was much too nimble for him and fled through the gap like a shadow.
Worst sentence: A yellow butterfly flickered past him, close enough for him to have swiped at it, if he had wanted to, and usually he would have, but this morning he remained aloof.
Even worse: Summer was a shiny young blonde, stunningly pretty, with huge blue eyes and a little snub nose and naturally pouting lips.
It goes on like this: This morning she was wearing a tiny strapless top in strawberry pink wedge-shaped sandals to match her top.
Then you realize you weren’t paying attention: Summer isn’t summer, Summer is actually a girl, not a metaphor for summer, and you understand fully why your life is a shambles.

Graham Masterson is considered one of the bestselling horror novelists in the world right now. What you may not have known is that Graham Masterson, which is almost certainly a made-up name, is also a prolific writer of sex instruction books, with 27 titles listed on Wikipedia, including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed, How To Drive Your Man Even Wilder In Bed, and How A Woman Longs To Be Loved. If Graham Masterson writes sex instruction like he writes fiction, there is going to be some shitty shitty sex going on tonight.

This book opens on a man talking to his cat. Then he talks to a pole dancer. Then you go fill your eyes with glass so you’ll never have to read anything this bad again. But it occurs to you that there may be an audiobook version, so you fill your ears with super glue. And then you realize there may be braille versions of this book, and even though you dropped out of braille class, you slam your fingers in a car door until they fall off. And then you are finally happy.

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Kill The Dead

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by Richard Kadrey
2010 Harper Voyager

Method of selection: It has “kill” in the title.

First sentence: Imagine shoving a cattle prod up a rhino’s ass, shouting “April fool!”, and hoping the rhino thinks it’s funny.
Worst sentence: God said, “Let there be Light, and cheap take-out Chinese,” and the Grand Central Market appeared.
Number of African children who died of malaria, which is easily and cheaply treatable, while I was writing this review:  About 40
Percentage of you who  will fact-check that number: About 10
Percentage of you who will do anything about it: A number statistically insignificant from 0
Percentage of you who think this is HILARIOUS: 100

Other reviews: io9, The Mad Hatter, The Guilded Earlobe, David Forbes

Richard Kadrey is a quirky writer. And I use that word as insultingly as possible. With a first sentence like that, I was sure this would at the very least be an entertaining read. Instead it’s sophomoric. Not quite “puerile”, like a James Patterson novel, but definitely at that level where I actually had to make sure this wasn’t young adult fiction.

Kill The Dead is a vampire novel, so not very original. There is nothing Richard Kadrey can do with vampires that the Twilight saga hasn’t already done. And with much better-looking people. But Kadrey’s writing is almost insulting to the reader, borderline offensive. He writes quirky sentences like:

Cue the sheep who stand around pointing and the Captain Americas who run to help.

and

[she] wants to get out of the sun before she turns into chicken-fried steak.

The whole first three pages take place in the narrator’s head. It isn’t a story it’s a monologue. And it’s about vampires and how they’re hard to kill. Kadrey writes with this inside-joke snarkiness that reminds me of chick lit. Every other statement is snark and forced wit. None of it is funny, and nothing about this book is compelling. My health insurance member handbook is more spellbinding, and funnier. I dare you to read the outpatient benefit limit table and not laugh.

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Kill Me If You Can

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by James Patterson
2011 Little, Brown

Method of selection: This week’s #1 NYT bestseller

First sentence: Some people are harder to kill than others.
Alternative uses for disposed copies of this book: drop from helicopters to soak up flood waters, build a world-record stack of James Patterson books, throw at James Patterson at readings — aim for the dick

Other reviews: Book Loons, Always With a Book, Book Reporter

James Patterson must be stopped. He is a cancer on a rotting leprous vestigial limb of literature’s swollen anus. With time he will consume all other authors like a black shitty hole, and we will see him “co-authoring” works with Joyce Carol Oates and Maya Angelou. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read my review of Toys.

I seriously want to know what this man does with all his money. He can’t actually spend it all. Nobody can spend the amount of money James Patterson makes. Does he eat it? Does he pay flunkies to shovel it into furnaces which heat his mansions? Perhaps he has devised a method of removing the cotton content from US currency and uses the cotton for clothing for starving African orphans, who he then eats. I’m not saying James Patterson is a cannibal, but he probably is a racist.

There is actually no reason to even explain what happens in the first three pages of this book. There is a ghost dressed as a homeless guy. He has a Glock and tries to shoot another guy. I’ve seen better writing from stillborn babies. I’m sorry if that sounds like I’m disparaging stillborn babies by comparing them to James Patterson, but it’s not my fault your baby died. You’re just a bad person. Stop crying. You look really ugly when you cry and I don’t sleep with ugly girls or failures so you’re hurting your chances.

My god James Patterson brings out the worst in me. I think I need a therapist.

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Spy

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by Ted Bell
2006 Atria Books (Simon & Schuster)

First sentence: He had never expected to survive the sinking of his boat.
Favorite sentence: Food and drinks are prohibited from this section of the library.
Three pages of clichés: the river a quiet mirror, endless jungle, fallen silent, the peace was suddenly shattered, a rain of lead, engulfed in flames, sold to the highest bidder
You might also enjoy: contact sex with your cats, soccer

Other reviews: What James Reads, Large Print Reviews

Oh Atria Books, can you produce anything that isn’t shit? I’m starting to feel bad for suggesting that Atria is just a front for a meth lab, because that horribly disparages meth labs and the hardworking men and women who strive to create a pure product that brings joy to so many. Atria Books is more like a terrorist organization, which wants you to die, and is willing to sacrifice themselves to make you die.

This book begins with a prologue, which in a work of fiction is like a middle finger to the reader. Is the prologue important to the story? It wasn’t good enough to be a real chapter, so surely I can skip it… Will it contain a useless sideshow prequel that sets the mood of the main plotline? Or is it just some crap that didn’t fit anywhere so you tossed it there?

I elected to skip the prologue and start at chapter one because nothing comes before one except zero. And zero is the part where I am sleeping, which is a better use of my time than this book was.

At first it wasn’t clear if this was a shitty book or not, but then I saw this sentence, like a dead shitty giveaway:

The river was alive with death.

Oxymorons like this are tricks hacks use to make you think they are clever, but this is the most cliché-infested writing I’ve ever seen. Reading along further, Bell inserts an inexplicable vernacular apostrophe that completely stalls your thought process:

When he heard the explosion for’ard, and felt the yawl stagger and founder…

I must have glanced back at that for’ard twenty times because I couldn’t believe it was really there.

I will give Ted Bell credit, though, for packing in a lot of action in three pages. Here’s what happened in that span:

  1. a boat travelling on a river hits a mine and gets strafed by machine gun fire
  2. the survivor enters the water only to be attacked by a “water boa”
  3. he is then captured by indians and sold into slavery
  4. he fights off his captors and escapes
  5. he fakes his own death, then jumps back into the river
All that in just three pages. And yet, Ted Bell is such a shitty writer I was bored by this story.
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by Lisa Gardner
2007 Bantam Books (Random House)

Method of selection: one-word titles

First sentence: My father explained it to me the first time when I was seven years old: The world in a system.
Notables: To this day I don’t know how many cities we lived in. Or how many names I assumed. And That was the first night my father slept in my bed.

I desperately wanted to hate this — you have no idea how desperately. The title is pathetic, the cover is trashy and simplistic, it’s a New York Times Bestselling author (who has a thing for one-word titles), and the synopsis is ridiculous.

Normally when I’m looking for books to write about, I read the first page and try to quickly decide if it is shitty, not shitty, or neither, in which case I move on to the next. But like a Stephen King novel, I found myself reading on for many pages, past my normal three, unable to determine whether it was shitty or not. And as I have discussed before, the ability to keep you reading is the mark of a good writer. This isn’t good, but it sneaks into the not shitty category because it moves quickly, displays action, sadness, and just enough gravitas to sustain me. I’m almost sad to not have the time to find out what happens. But not really sad.

Still, even six whole giant pages in, I was conflicted with this sickening sense of being infected, because I still wanted to hate it. And I suppose that’s the definition of prejudice.

But hell, talent is talent. Read on. You can always throw up later.

Other reviews: Material Witness, Novel Ladies, Duffbert’s Random Musings, Bundu Reviews

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Sorry

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by Gail Jones
2007 Europa Editions

Method of selection: one-word titles

First: A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath. This is a story that can only be told in a whisper.
What got my attention: …her dress, the particular blue of hydrangeas, spattered with the purple of my father’s blood.

Other reviews: Reading Matters, Literary Minded, omphaloskepsis, Let’s Arise Again

I consider myself passably intellectual, but many of the books I like are not. It seems like more astute authors are just as likely to be poor writers (while more likely to be poor financially) as their trash paperback brethren, but they mask their ineptitude with vocabulary, complex concepts, and humor, as I have done with this very sentence.

So I get very excited to find a book that is a challenging read, but with language that still manages to flow, and to engage. Such is the case with Sorry by Gail Jones.

This book seemed to have everything working against it, with a plot involving a young girl in the Australia, World War II, two intellectual but shitty parents, a deaf-mute boy, and a misfit aboriginal girl. And Gail Jones herself lives in Perth, which I’m told is the end of the Earth. It all sounds terribly boring, but the text is alive because Gail Jones is not a shitty writer, giving us gems like these:

  • …unseemly, but oh! vivacious with gore.
  • …to sense skin as a gift…
  • There might have been a snake in the house, for all our watchful attention.

It is not plain language, but rather precise language, and I was quickly swept into the anguish and tragedy of the story. While the writing flows, it is still challenging and at times one has to re-read whole paragraphs to take it all in, but this is a good thing. It is stuffed margin to margin with information, and that satisfies my intellectual urges while still stimulating my emotional ones. It reminds me a bit of Jeanette Winterson, who is one of my favorites.

Sorry is so not shitty, it’s actually good.

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Wings: A Novel of World War II Flygirls

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by Karl Friedrich
2011 McBooks Press

Method of selection: One-word titles

First sentence: Sally Ketchum peered over the edge of the cockpit.
You will enjoy if: you own many ironic T-shirts
Alternative uses for this book: use to fire a furnace that drives a turbine that generates electricity to run a paper shredder to shred other copies of this book

Other reviews: Book Babe, Iwriteinbooks’s Blog, Jules’s Book Reviews, My Aunt’s Bookshelf

This is a fabulous tutorial for writers on how not to start a novel. This novel is about female pilots during WWII, which one would expect to be an exciting story filled with lessons of history. The author even chooses to open the story in flight, and yet he completely drains all the energy out of the situation by wiping out any foundation of fact, emotion, or action. First, read this, the second paragraph of the work:

They were over Oklahoma by now. Or maybe it was still Texas down there. There was no way to tell, really…the pitifully dried-out browns of one were pretty much identical to the other. But the truth was that she didn’t care where they were, exactly. And she was pretty sure that Tex didn’t, either. Texas was behind them, or soon would be. Oklahoma was beneath them, or soon would be. And soon up ahead was sure to be a town that was near a field of adequate width and flatness and emptiness to set the Jenny down softly.

In case you missed why this is such laughably shitty writing, I will now paraphrase this entire passage, plus the first sentence, to demonstrate:

I watched the dog that was biting me.
The dog was a very large dog.  Or maybe it was a small dog biting my arm. Isn’t dog size all relative?  Four legs, fur and a tail and some other things…all dogs look pretty much the same to me.  But it doesn’t matter because I don’t really care about dogs, and neither does Spencer.  Spencer was riding his bike, or maybe he wasn’t doing that.  The dog was little, or maybe it was just a puppy. And eventually I might want to think about detaching the dog and finding a band-aid or some antiseptic or a doctor. Or maybe I’ll just go home and have lunch because I’m hungry but I might do something else.

See? This kind of writing is only useful when you’re making fun of this kind of writing. Every sentence is a wet dream of cliches, passive voice, past perfect tense, and cumbersome, bloodletting syntax and word selection. Here are some standouts:

  • The hurricane force of the propeller and the blast of gases from the engine’s exhaust instantly lessened, thanks to the little cocoon of relative protection provided by the wooden cockpit.
  • She couldn’t see his face, but she knew from experience that it would be even grittier than hers.
  • Just like that, she’d gone from breathing but being dead, to loving life as much as rock candy.
It is so consistently bad I had to start a new category, “Shitty But Ironically Not”. Perhaps McDonald’s Hamburgers shouldn’t be publishing books.

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Room

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by Emma Donaghue
2010 Little, Brown and Company

Method of selection: One-word titles

First sentence: Today I’m five.
Worst sentence: There’s the stain I spilled by mistake getting born.
Anthropopomomorphised objects in  first three pages: Wardrobe, Bed, Skylight, Lamp, Rug, Mr. Five, Rocker, Watch, Duvet (really???), Mirror, Kit, Shelf, Bath
Things I’d rather read: the dedication plates on park benches, toaster instructions

This book is written in a bit of a vernacular. It’s also written from the point-of-view of a five year old, which is similar to, but stupider than, a vernacular. Even talented authors rarely write vernacular well, and five-year-olds are not the best writers anyway, so you can guess how I feel about this book, in spite of its unique story.

As the book opens, a child and his mother share a small room, where the child anthropomorphises and capitalizes everything, eliminating articles, so when they talk they sound like cavemen, or stereotypes of Native Americans:

  • Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp.
  • I jump on Rocker and look at Watch.
  • When are presents meant to open?
  • Why are the eyes of the me shut?

There’s 320 pages in this book. I’ll never make it.

I don’t know five-year-olds who talk like this. But I only know maybe thirty or forty five-year-olds, or I did but now they’re buried in my basement. What I worry about most (besides the Children of the Basement reanimating and stealing all my Juice Boxes) are Emma Donoghue’s two young children. She clearly hasn’t been talking to them and they may need to be liberated.

The concept of the book is actually a great a idea: a woman imprisoned in a tiny room with her young son tries to make the room liveable for him, but he is oblivious until he starts to notice what is going on. But why a five-year-old? Wouldn’t a nine-year-old at least have been better, so we didn’t have to slog through all the caveman talk? I don’t want to call it shitty, but as you can see my hands are tied.

The synopsis says this book is shocking, exhilarating, riveting, deeply human, and always moving. The best book I ever read wasn’t all those things. Why would a publisher lie just so you’ll buy their shitty book?

Other reviews: One Minute Book Reviews, Book Lover Book Reviews, Novelicious, Shelf Life

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Playing With Boys

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by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
2004 St. Martin’s Press

First sentence: There were times that made me s’dang proud to be a Mexican I wept ’til my mascara melted — say, when Vincente Fernandez sang “Cielito Lindo” for the Republican National Convention in 2000.
All-time worst title for a book: “Playing With Boys”
Only way to make it worse: “Playing With Little Boys”
Way to make it funnier: “Playing With Boys While Dressed as the Easter Bunny”
Way to make it a horror novel: “She Played With Boys”
Way to make it a tragic but ultimately heart-warming story of an impoverished black family during the Jim Crow era of the Deep South: “Mamma Played With Boys”

I was unaware that Mexican-Americans are important. I thought they were just dishwashers. But Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez makes the argument that they have other important roles in our society, such as mariachi bands. She lays this out in a collection of essays disguised as fiction. I know she is an essayist because there is no story here, just a desperate female narrator using a tongue-in-cheek way of addressing the reader as “darlin’”, as “y’all”, and through frequent parenthetical statements which are supposed to be funny, but are instead the opposite of funny.

The opposite of funny is holocaust. And that’s what this book is. A holocaust. For my dignity.

I have no beef with chick lit, but someday I hope one of its many authors will explain why they have to write their books as if all their readers are high school sophomores. It’s degrading.

Other reviews: Fresh Fiction, Book Reporter

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Under the Dome

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by Stephen King
2009 Scribner (Simon & Schuster)

Method of selection: Random number generator (really)
First sentence: From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down.
Other uses for this book, after reading: use to mash woodchucks, use as a paperweight for smaller books during a hurricane

Before my review, you should know that I am already a Stephen King fan, but I had to choose this book because my random number generator took me to a shelf that was all Stephen King.

I know of no other writer who so swiftly draws you in and keeps you there, without complicated language or tricks. It is storytelling at its most basic. I chose this book out of all the Stephen King books because it was written recently, and I assumed that this late in his career, he must be losing steam. I was totally wrong.

The first thing you see in opening this book is a map of the town of Chester’s Mill, which immediately gives you all the sense of place you need for this story, and further suggests that things are going to get complicated enough that a map will be necessary (and at 1,071 pages, it better get complicated). There is also a list of all the people in the town on the day it is domed over, including three dogs.

The story opens on a banal scene where two people pilot a small plane over the town. At first I thought King had gone soft, until the second page when he announces “Their lives had another forty seconds to run”. Then we get a micro-story about a fat and happy woodchuck who gets smashed in half, followed by a description of the plane crash. So at the end of three pages I’m dying to read on and see what happens. And that’s what King does so well. Even though the writing isn’t always brilliant, at times even juvenile, you always want to see what comes next. King is one of the few writers that makes the very act of reading fun. Not shitty!

Other reviews: Den of Geek, Not A Fanatic, The Book Stop, HorrorScope

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