Worst Authors

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If we're including any kind of fanfiction (and I'll put it in that thread as well), then what about The Girl Who Lived series by Keiran Halycon? Basically, if Harry was a girl who thought nothing of using the Dark Arts on a whim and became a druid and a speshul animagus... Mary Sue galore, regardless of your thoughts on the canon Harry.

As for worst writer, I think you can include just about any trashy romance novel. They're, more often than not, terrible.
 
The plot of every Nicholas Sparks novel:
Pretty white people fall in luuuurrrrve
Something gets in the way of their perfect luuuuuurrrve
Someone dies
The End
 
Alden Bell - Writer of The Reapers are the Angels...It's like a tumblr-made zombie book...
Narrative is illogical, features crap characters, appalling, smug, seriously bad...
 
I know I already said something similar, albeit abridged, in the Unpopular Opinions About Books thread but here it goes

Bret Easton Ellis.

Like Chuck Palahniuk, he's pretty much the king of edgelords in literary circles. But whereas Palahniuk has written some stuff that I've actually liked and actually is pretty diverse in his writting style and plots, Ellis has not. Literally every book of his has more or less has the same prose: Do drugs, reference an 80s (or later, depending on when it was written) song or band, sex, gore, ANOTHER 80s pop culture reference. Rinse in repeat, although not in that order. Shit gets tired pretty quick. And it's not like I didn't try to give him a chance. I read four of his books. As a teenager, I wanted to like him so bad. I thought the whole world of the 80s and doing drugs was so cool. But I guess I matured because I soon realized that all of his stuff is the same. And at the risk of sounding like a tumblrina, the misogyny in some of his books really rub me the wrong way. Patrick Bateman is a fantastic character but that's about it.
 
Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth kind of makes me conflicted. I liked it at first, but about halfway through the second book I couldn't handle how heavyhanded he was with his Objectivist allegory (we get it, this is The Fountainhead 2: Fantasy Boogaloo). A lot of the violent and sexual content also seemed more titillating than useful to the narrative to me.

I also think some of the plays by Shakespeare that are foisted on high school students are pretty worthless, honestly (this is, however, not true of all his works). Romeo and Juliet is over-romanticized bollocks, Julius Caesar is interesting but is never taught particularly well, and I'm sick to death of Hamlet.
 
Zeorus said:
Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth kind of makes me conflicted. I liked it at first, but about halfway through the second book I couldn't handle how heavyhanded he was with his Objectivist allegory (we get it, this is The Fountainhead 2: Fantasy Boogaloo). A lot of the violent and sexual content also seemed more titillating than useful to the narrative to me.
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I loved the series in high school, went back and re-read it in a fit of nostalgia recently and found it abhorrent. I guess I'm a bit dense cause I didn't remember the allegory being nearly as on the nose, nor did I grow up to become a Randian.
 
sugoi-chan said:
I loved the series in high school, went back and re-read it in a fit of nostalgia recently and found it abhorrent. I guess I'm a bit dense cause I didn't remember the allegory being nearly as on the nose, nor did I grow up to become a Randian.
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Literally the only good thing to come out of that series is the "so cheesy it's delightful" TV show featuring BDSM lesbians who kill people with magic pain dildos.
 
Zeorus said:
Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth kind of makes me conflicted. I liked it at first, but about halfway through the second book I couldn't handle how heavyhanded he was with his Objectivist allegory (we get it, this is The Fountainhead 2: Fantasy Boogaloo). A lot of the violent and sexual content also seemed more titillating than useful to the narrative to me.
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From the sporkings I've read, there is something really icky about Goodkind's work nor is he as smart as he thinks he is. His work has a lot of massive cruelty towards children and a major, creepy rape fetish. I can understand and am fine that there are times where these things happen. Yet, when you have descriptive scenes of a child being tortured (when burying him up to his neck for days should've made him suffocate), raped, killed and revived as an undead abomination is pushing it. Also, if you have a lecture on your pet subject that goes over 40 pages, your story has stopped being fiction.

Speaking of Rand fans, Andrew Zar (Dark Brain comics) is another boarder line writer. He's someone who has moments where he's good (other than the ill-fitting art, "Too Important" is great) and has an interesting idea or two, but he is an edgelord (a woman having a bestiality orgy with lions anyone?), doesn't carry the ideas to their fullest potential and also has a creepy rape fetish ("The Butcher" has not met a woman it doesn't want to graphically rape and abuse at least once). On one hand his stuff is for adults and men are not immune to straight rape, but his obsessions and desire to be edgy can work against him to the point that it comes off as an eye-rolling "not this crap again" than genuine impact.

Xeopatra: The idea of a person where zombies will not harm her, see her as a friend (one becomes her boyfriend) and she has a bit of the power to control them is a unique one with lots of story potential. Will she make an army to fight other zombies, use them to dominate humans or try to convince them that zombie are not so bad as long as you feed them? But at times this is forgotten where she becomes a scummy biker gang's concubine for protection and only uses the power to make a new boyfriend so they can have lots of sex (especially in a church or in front of a giant wooden cross).

Overall, he's a case of wasted potential.
 
Shokew said:
The guys behind the Left Behind books (both the adult ones and the "Kids" series...). I don't think I need to elaborate why...
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Having read both of these, I'll go into a little more detail.

The overall prose is bad for both series. The underlying plot is based on a very specific interpretation of the Bible by pre-millieniallist Christians mixed with a lot of crap ripped right out of New World Order conspiracy theorist literature. I believe a blogger named Fred Clark does a much more in-depth examination, but the main series pretty much follows a checklist and quit talking about or referring to events past a certain point except maybe as brief asides, like the Rapture, an event whose implications could have been examined for an entire book but is mostly forgotten past one third of the first book, and the rest of the series follows the same line. The epilogue books suck worse because they basically lack any real drama and a mass of padding to get to the end.

The prequel books of the mainline series are slightly more interesting but introduce a bunch of really sloppy retcons to the mainline series (like how one of the main characters is mentioned to have a smuggling background and who knows a character who was introduced later that was barely explained in the main series that still doesn't make a lot of sense)

The kids series is also kinda bad, but honestly, not as much. They do a little more world building than the main series and actually go into more detail in many areas than the main series on some things, but they also contain a lot of poorly wedged in ties to the main series to connect them that don't add up very well (such as any time the main series and kid series casts interact). Overall, though, it suffers many of the same problems as the main books.
 
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Vauxhall13 said:
The plot of every Nicholas Sparks novel:
Pretty white people fall in luuuurrrrve
Something gets in the way of their perfect luuuuuurrrve
Someone dies
The End
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This. A million times this.

K>C said:
Sparks is rumored to be an Anti-Semite and fundie.
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He is. Also something to wonder about...ever notice how his version of the South has little to no black people (in the books and the films)?
 
bradsternum said:
To whomever said Stephen King is a bad author, I disagree. He's definitely not the most gifted, but he's certainly enthusiastic about writing itself, and that automatically puts him leagues ahead of many other "popular novelists" (Grisham, Cussler, etc.) I do think he needs to reassess his disinterest in plotting, but then again, there are plenty of writers who don't plot their work and come out with winners. Breaking Bad was written this way - each season, the writers had a rough idea of where it was heading, but didn't know the specifics. This can result in lousy reveals (the pool in Season 2) or amazing ones (the machine gun in Season 5.)

As for bad authors... Jesus, where to begin? Most of the stuff that is put out now is all about marketing first and quality second. "Queen of the Tearling" (heralded as a young adult Game of Thrones/Hunger Games/Twilight) is ABYSMAL. "The Bone Season," another example of the "Ohh young author, she's a genius"disease. I think Anne Rice is pretty terrible, despite her reputation among goths and horror fans. I think Chuck Palaniuk is a one trick pony, and Saint David Foster Wallace is worshipped by elitist punks who think dense writing is good writing.
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The problem with Stephen King is that he built up an unsustainable reputation as the "king of horror" so whenever he puts out a book people expect a masterpiece of grimdark horror and then get disappointed when it isn't. Which is a shame because King's attempts at mystery and fantasy, Eyes Of The Dragon, The Wind Through the Keyhole, Mr Mercedes, ect are just as good if not better than his horror works.
 
TheMightyMonarch said:
I know I already said something similar, albeit abridged, in the Unpopular Opinions About Books thread but here it goes

Bret Easton Ellis.

Like Chuck Palahniuk, he's pretty much the king of edgelords in literary circles. But whereas Palahniuk has written some stuff that I've actually liked and actually is pretty diverse in his writting style and plots, Ellis has not. Literally every book of his has more or less has the same prose: Do drugs, reference an 80s (or later, depending on when it was written) song or band, sex, gore, ANOTHER 80s pop culture reference. Rinse in repeat, although not in that order. Shit gets tired pretty quick. And it's not like I didn't try to give him a chance. I read four of his books. As a teenager, I wanted to like him so bad. I thought the whole world of the 80s and doing drugs was so cool. But I guess I matured because I soon realized that all of his stuff is the same. And at the risk of sounding like a tumblrina, the misogyny in some of his books really rub me the wrong way. Patrick Bateman is a fantastic character but that's about it.
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Didn't he also flip out about a woman directing American Psycho?
 
IJustWantToSeeAttachments said:
The play becomes much easier to swallow once you start reading it as a parody of over-zealous teenage romance.
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Pretty much how I read it. In my opinion, it's a tragedy not in how "romantic" it is but in how two idiot teenagers committed suicide over a crush. If they didn't commit suicide (and if there wasn't the feud especially), the romance would've burned out as quickly as the one Romeo was complaining about earlier in the play and there's a chance Juliet could've actually been happy with Paris. The fact that teenagers especially think it's this incredibly romantic story (assuming teachers themselves aren't telling them it is) says that, if this was the intention of the play all along, Shakespeare had a point.

Anyway, that's getting off-topic.

On a personal level, I think Victoria Holt isn't a very good writer if only because nearly every single one of her books is a copy-paste of the same plot. Seriously, pick any two books and you'll find the same characters with different names and MAYBE a different appearance. The only ones of hers I don't outright dislike are the rare ones that deviated even a little from her formula.

I'm really not meaning this in a "well a plot's going to be similar if it's from the same writer" way. I mean pretty much everything in her books is the same. Same characters, just different names and a different setting. It even has the same "twist" every single time. And since she's a romance novelist, you can guess how the characters are: the love interests are abusive rich assholes who decide they know what's best for the protagonist and protagonists are unnecessarily bitchy "strong, independent" women who claim they don't need anyone. While I will say that the books were written years and years ago, that doesn't excuse the copy-paste plots.
 
systemlord_baal said:
Tom Kratman for being completely batshit against Muslims (and thinks that Rammstein are neo-nazis. What a goddamn cunt), Anne Rice (for her being an asshole to her fans, not for writing bad books. Her books are OK, but I read them too long ago, probably I wouldn't like them now) and the idiot who wrote Twilight.
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Kratman hated someone who sporked his book so much that he wrote grisly deaths for her.

Kratman does have a huge Nazi boner, despite the fact he is Jewish enough to qualify for Israeli citizenship.
 
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