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Wild Animus is fantastically bad. The author gave away anywhere between 50,000 and 5,000,000 of free copies all over the place. It's absolutely everywhere, but nobody has ever purchased a copy. quote:i got this as a freebie at the final Phish concert. quote:This book came to me very awkwardly, they dropped a copy of it in the front yard and i read it quote:Oh, that's right, our book group got a bunch of copies for FREE from the publisher along with smoked fish. quote:Venture capitalist puts id firmly in anus. Becomes furry. Blathers. quote:Not to mention the audiobook, which was also given away in huge quantities. In 2009, a librarian used the WorldCat database to determine which sound recording was available in the greatest number of libraries in the world. Harry Potter books came in at second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Number one? Yep. Wild Animus. While I'm here, I should also mention Tyra Banks' debut novel Modelland. The official theme song should be enough to let you know what you're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjC-L2O3I4g SurreptitiousMuffin has a new favorite as of 02:40 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 01:57
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Tiggum posted:I got this as part of some ebook bundle and couldn't get through it, then later found out that it's supposed to be really popular. I'm still not convinced that the people who say they like it aren't pulling some kind of elaborate prank, because really?
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Jul 4, 2015 08:03
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If we're on terrible Fantasy, here is a great page where Terry Goodkind gets thoroughly destroyed.quote:She is almost raped at least 9 times throughout the series, but always manages to escape/be rescued in the nick of time. On one occasion, she is attacked by a chicken that is not a chicken, but evil incarnate. It has an evil cackle.
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Jul 5, 2015 23:28
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Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence is inexplicably popular in the Book Barn. I picked it up because people kept recommending it, and was greeted by the bastard child of Dragonball Z and GRRM at his worst. The very first chapter has the protagonist raping two women, then locking them in a barn and lighting it on fire, then laughing about it with his buddies while the women scream in the background. This is framed like "whoa what an edgy bad boy we've got here he's so cooooooool" but it's so horrible and over-the-top that you end up hating the guy very quickly. He's given a TRAGIC BACKSTORY to explain why he's such an rear end in a top hat (he got pushed into a bush and it hurt real bad) but it never really justifies the over-the-top horrifying poo poo that he does. At one point he tears out an enemy's heart and eats it. Not for any particular reason -- just because I guess he's hungry? If that isn't enough, it is super anime. It is the most anime book that I've ever read. I don't really know how to go into a lot of detail there but everybody is incredibly young and handsome: Jorg, our protagonist, is 14 years old and the most handsome man alive and also the best fighter and general and at one point he stares down a ghost and it RESPECTS HIM SO MUCH that it leaves him alone. He is also, as mentioned, a rapist, a murderer and a cannibal. It reads like it was written by a 14 year-old boy overdosing on Adderall while writing down all the HARDCORE stuff his mom JUST DOESN'T UNDERSTAND and masturbating furiously. I kept reading it because the Book Barn said it got better, but it never did. I mean, it got comparatively better from the way it started, but it never stopped being pure garbage.
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Jul 6, 2015 07:39
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Evfedu posted:I thoroughly enjoyed Prince of Thorns, and King of Thorns moreso. Emperor of Thorns... eh. Also feel the guy with the bearded nerd-atar is mis-characterising the books, but w/e. Also my av is Ted Berrigan and he does not belong in the bad book thread.  I did pick the gooniest looking photo of him I could find though.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:05
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pentyne posted:Speaking of crazy popular bad fantasy, the loving Kingkiller series. The author has succumbed to his fame so hard that 2/3 of the way through an trilogy that promised to show the rise and fall of an epic hero book 2 ends with hero still in his mid teens at magic school and hopelessly in love with a courtesan who sees him as a nice guy. Also sex ninjas and the hero bangs every girl he comes across and is so good at sex his first time he beds a fairie goddess known for killing people via sex and overwhelms her. And the third book is essentially non-existent as the writer takes on tons of RPG/D&D/Kickstarter writing projects and attends every con in existence. After that, he goes north to the realm of the sex samurai, who teach him the art of war and also free love. He's like 15. SurreptitiousMuffin has a new favorite as of 19:40 on Jul 19, 2015 |
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Jul 19, 2015 19:37
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I am having the alternate experience and want to crack open my copy just to see how long I can stand it. Did I also mention that this book is 994 pages and a whole lot of that is Kvothe worrying about his finances? I swear the whole first 1/3 of the book is him schlepping around campus and thinking about the money he doesn't have. He moons over this one girl he can't have, while every other woman in the book is secretly into him but he just doesn't realise it. If Rothfuss spins around with book 3 and says "surprise, Kvothe is totally full of poo poo and is just kind of a loser blowhard" then I will do a total 180 on these books. The whole gimmick is that he's like 30 and telling his story back to a random bard-scribe-dude, so it's possible but I don't think it's very likely. There are actually pretty good aspects of it; Rothfuss writes very nice prose, and the world and the magic are pretty interesting. In the first book, the good things overpower the bad. In the second book, they take a backseat to terrible sex scenes and author wish fulfillment. Rothfuss kinda galls me, because he's clearly talented, but he really needs a loving editor to slap him around and say "this does not belong in the book." Cut 80% of the campus poo poo and 100% of the weird sex, then cut the Nice Guy bullshit. It's 994 pages, so it's not like it was gonna be too short. Actually do something with the cool plot arcs with the Chandrian and the weird present-day horror movie poo poo that's going on while Kvothe narrates. It's frustrating that so much good poo poo gets set up, then totally ignored for more Kvothe being sad that girls don't like him.
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Jul 19, 2015 20:54
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Sleeveless posted:Did you even read the post you were replying to. At one point they're driving along in a huge gas-guzzling SUV, and they manage to escape some bad poo poo. The narrator then goes "man, imagine if we'd been in a prius lol liberals are terrible."
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Jul 19, 2015 21:24
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Sleeveless posted:It's OK, it's so ridiculous that it's worth pointing out twice. It's the biblical apocalypse, except demons are actually aliens. The book ends because the Good Christians kept their faith and resisted the devil, and after all the heathens and liberals have been abducted/dragged to hell, our protagonists are left to recreate the world the right way. They never actually really fight back, they just kinda survive thanks to their faith. And yes, there is a gratuitous golden labrador.
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Jul 19, 2015 22:13
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Has anybody read the Iron Druid books? Amazon kept recommending them to me for ages and they looked like hot garbage.
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Aug 22, 2015 01:56
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Theglavwen posted:The main character, a millenia old druid, at one point talks about squeeing, verbatim, upon meeting Neil Gaiman at a con.
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Aug 26, 2015 02:05
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I might catch some flak for this, but I could not stand Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It feels like it desperately needs an editor to clean up all the twee prose tics and it also just needs to get to the loving point. There's only so much "rich people attend parties with other rich people who they do not like but are icily polite to" I can take before I give up.
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Nov 1, 2015 05:21
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If you think the Wraeththu books are bad, the RPG will ruin you.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:22
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Cumslut1895 posted:this is a pretty bad book:
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Nov 2, 2015 22:38
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I don't think digital copies exist, but paper copies have gone down to 15 cents.
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Nov 6, 2015 06:46
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Scandalous Wench posted:I need a goony takedown of Eat, Pray, Love so hard. Please make this happen! The book has loving ruined the town. Not in a weird snooty hippy way, but in a "all this tourism money has gentrified it so hard that most of the locals can't afford to eat" kinda way. I meal that would cost 7000 rupiah (70c USD) in Surabaya costs upwards of 20,000 in Ubud. Compared to everywhere else in Indonesia, the prices are ridiculous and it's swarming with homeless. There's a very real feeling of resentment from the locals and I don't blame them at all. Also in the weird snooty hippy way though, the town is overrun with obnoxious "spiritual" couples who are furious that they're not the only other white people there. They wanted a cultural experience, dammit. They wanted magical foreigns to make their souls complete.
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Nov 9, 2015 21:25
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"Fun" Ubud story: I went there with my sister to chill out during Eidul Fitri and all the other white people just ignored me. I went back alone later and suddenly all the white guys were super aggro. It was this weird hostile thing where they were all watching me like hawks and holding their wives closer. I'm pretty average looking and was just minding my own business, but I got treated like some sorta Fabio dude who was trying to steal their wives away. I just wanted to sit somewhere pretty and read a book. If you're a white guy in Ubud without a woman nearby, the rest of the white people lose their poo poo. Because of Eat, Pray, Love you see, it's a romance town and nobody could be there because it's got nice temples to walk around in or anything. I was working in Eastern Java and Bali was a nice change of pace but goddam the Australian frat bros have ruined Kuta, and the "spiritual" yuppie couples have ruined Ubud. on the plus side, the vet's office has renamed itself "Eat, Spay, Love" and I got a little laugh out of that. rant over, but I've spent a lot of time in Indonesia and I have strong opinions about Bali.
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Nov 9, 2015 23:09
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We need to go deeper SurreptitiousMuffin has a new favorite as of 10:22 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 10:13
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Chuck Tingle is a wonderful genius who has no place in this thread, but after bringing up Piers Anthony I feel like we need some more levity in the thread. Have some Best of Chuck Tingle.     
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Nov 12, 2015 10:21
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ooh, this talk of terrible writers who can't deal with people not liking their books reminds me of our very own Noah Murphy.quote:Two heroes and a heroine, identified by their eccentric appearance and ID pinned to their clothes, walked up the concourse with the heroine in the lead. quote:Liza began to convulse… and transform. Her smooth curves and breasts were replaced with rock-hard muscles. Her clothes were shredded as she grew another foot in height. Her skin tanned and her hair lengthened. The seat belt snapped and the sedan dented to accommodate her massive form. quote:Author Noah Murphy sets himself up as a sort of jaded, Byronic figure in an industry he describes as poisoned and slipshod; unfortunately with zero critical or commercial success to speak of, his diatribe reads as little more than the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of a spurned, lazy amateur. One must qualify their opinion in order to make the sort of hard-hitting statement about an industry that Murphy is attempting here, and his only tenuous claims to credibility seem to be a PR fiasco surrounding the laughable "novel" Ethereal Girls and the exorbitant amounts of capital he's pissed away trying to hock his previous sub-par efforts. He also does his own (equally terrible) illustrations, and has a blog with important essays like Candy Crush Saga and the Erosion of the Middle Class.
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Nov 20, 2015 21:00
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I haven't read that, but it does remind me of this terrible cyberpunk novel I started where a woman is a corporate spy who needs to infiltrate a building. She goes into their bathrooms, then shits out a robotic cockroach that has wires going up her rear end, then it goes through the plumbing and lets her listen in on a meeting. God, what was that one? It wasn't Piers Anthony but it was somebody in his ilk.
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Nov 25, 2015 07:14
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Biffmotron posted:That'd be The Nano Flower by Peter F. Hamilton, who deserves a much longer post from somebody who actually remembers the details of his Night's Dawn series. quote:Common themes in his books are sexually precocious teenagers, politics, religion, and armed conflict.
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Nov 25, 2015 22:35
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malal posted:I submit a book called "Carrion Comfort." I honestly don't know why, I've read many other books that were written far shittier. It's just when I think about how awful the ending is, it completely obliterates the previous 90% of the book.
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Dec 6, 2015 21:22
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Stephen King's stuff is all connected in pretty weird ways. The dimension Pennywise comes from is the same place the government opens a hole to in The Mist, and probably the same place in From a Buick 8. For a really weird connection, there's a line in The Shining that seems to indicate Cthulhu is behind it all. Danny has a vision of something gigantic, with tentacles for a face, reaching out over the Overlook. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line, but it's definitely in there. Then of course The Author Stephen King gets hit by a van and a bunch of characters have to drop everything to save him. I have a very love/hate relationship with Stephen King.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:26
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Speaking of bad bestsellers, [b]The Da Vinci Code[/b ] is an utter trainwreck of amateurish bad writing built on a foundation of a D- understanding of history at best.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:02
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Yeah, PYF kinda went insane for a while. A lot of people (myself included) got a bit caught up in it. I can't speak for the others, but I feel like a loving idiot in hindsight. The very first TVT thread was definitely a mock thread though - I was the OP. It was entirely for laughing about Troper Tales, but once the thread ran out of funny ones and started digging into the forums, poo poo went really off the rails. Staring into the abyss etc etc. We really should've just let the threads die after we'd finished with Troper Tales.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:18
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I want you to imagine a man over 6'3, immensely hairy, wearing a suit and carrying a well-worn hatchet. "Vinnie's the rat," he says -- his voice is high and girlish -- "and when I find him, I'm gonna emancipate his head from his body."
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Apr 21, 2016 04:23
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I think the thing we're all really overlooking is that Grimm got nominated. You know, the show where X-Files meets Supernatural in the budget aisle and they get married in Vegas three hours later.
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Apr 27, 2016 08:25
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Elohssa Gib posted:My best guess is "Think of the Children!" edit: it's Saturn's Children by Charles Stross  
SurreptitiousMuffin has a new favorite as of 20:45 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 20:42
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hackbunny posted:This looks so stupid I know what to read next
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Jul 25, 2016 10:12
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Senior Woodchuck posted:He's not wrong. 90% of everything is crap, and it seems like 95% of readers eat it up with a fork.
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Jul 26, 2016 02:03
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 I can almost forgive him for words like "Walpurgian" and "Retroeschatonaut" 
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Jul 28, 2016 02:14
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We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. https://intheinbox.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/how-to-get-yourself-blacklisted/
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Jul 28, 2016 11:44
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Snapchat A Titty posted:You forgot that most words aren't bolded (say bold 10% of the words) & also a very few should be in italics or underlined. It's gotta resemble the cadence of speech you see...
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Jul 31, 2016 15:08
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The best response to that has always been (source)
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Aug 6, 2016 00:10
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 Dril Pencils is the best.
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Aug 6, 2016 02:18
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Neil Gaiman showing up as a character in the Severed Streets was annoying as gently caress as well. There was no reason it had to be him, but it was there so the author could write the word "squee" in his otherwise pretty excellent book.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:43
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Crosspost from the terrible headlines thread; some authors do NOT take criticism well. the author's blog, from a post called 'The Benevolent Stalker' posted:That evening, I went through her many Facebook pictures. “Maybe this one?” I asked in a chat message.
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Aug 23, 2016 10:17
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Megabound posted:And then trains with polyamorous sex ninjas.
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Aug 30, 2016 13:11
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pookel posted:My ex and all his fantasy-nerd friends raved about Name of the Wind. I read a couple chapters and was bored and irritated. I see I'm not alone in finding it off-putting. Maybe it helps to be a guy to appreciate it?
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Aug 30, 2016 22:44
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