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Mistress of the Art of Death

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MotAoDpbby Ariana Franklin (really Diana Norman)
Bantam Books 2007

Method of Selection: Somebody left it behind at a cafe. Broken in. Which means they read it all the way through and abandoned it like an unwanted child.
First sentence: A screaming year.
Worst sentence: At first the scream had hope in it.
New best way to open any sentence ever: The throat that issued the scream was too small…
Alternative uses for this book: really really expensive dog food that actually kills your dog, porno set soundproofing, impenetrable wall of unread Mistress of the Art of Deaths

Other reviews: Dear Author, All About Romance, Reactions to Reading

I’m pretty sure Ariana Franklin did all her research for this book at a medieval dinner theatre. But she didn’t pay attention. The Cornish game hen and Pepsi-Cola dinner is THAT GOOD. Also, there’s evidence she may have been blazed on Windex (but not quite blazed enough), and composed her narrative by writing something and chucking it under a lawnmower. She was also raised in a box and her parents were related to one another, and were sasquatches. How else can I explain the unbroken chain of blue ribbon shittyisms in the first three pages and the clear omission of basic fact-checking?

I give her credit, though: Ariana Franklin really sets the stage. She sets the stage SO HARD. In fact it’s mostly stage. There’s grateful air, come-and-get-me-I’m-frightened screams, a fox pausing mid-trot with one paw up to judge the threat to itself, and even the grunt of a badger. The rates are uncongenial to one’s rheumatism, the exclamations of hurt are bitten-off, and despite the pace he had to go AT, dominoes still tumble into the darkness (because who doesn’t like setting up dominoes for hours and then knocking them over in total darkness?).

With so much stage, though, there’s no telling which detail I’m supposed to focus on. The king? The English church? Maybe the child that keeps screaming. No, the screaming stopped. The child is dead I think. But the animals are still eating each other even though it’s an irrelevant detail. Perhaps the focus is the old man in the huge castle. (It’s a huge castle, not tiny. Not a tiny castle. Not in this book. In this book all the castles are huge.) Also in this version of history, the king of England uses words like “ain’t”, and makes jokes about a billiards table, even though the first known billiards table was owned by King Louis XI in the 15th century and this story is set in the 12th. Billiards may not have existed in 1170, but Wikipedia existed in 2007 when this book was published. So Ariana was just lazy.

It takes a special type of talent to write shittily this creatively. And at 507 pages, this book appears imposing. But that’s only because there are less words on each page than other books. The line spacing is set to WHALE. So don’t be afraid.

Unfortunately, Diana Norman (aka Ariana Franklin) died in 2011. In her honor, I’ve started a new category: Shitty But Dead

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)

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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

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)