Worst Authors

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Ruin said:
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.
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I'll also add that his short stories are WAY better than his novels, IMO. "The Mist", "Apt Pupil" and "The Body" are some of my favorite stories of all time. He also writes pretty damn good non-fiction. "Danse Macabre" and "On Writing" were great.

And swerving back on-topic, has anyone else had what I call "Story Nostalgia Disappointment"? My best example is "Quest for the Faradawn." by Richard Ford. I read it ages and ages ago, and thought it was fucking magical. And then I ran across a battered copy at a used book store twenty years later & snapped it up....

Only to re-read it and realize it was just overwrought Ferngully/Avatar bullshit, with cardboard characters straight-up ripped off from the Redwall series.

:( I used to love that book.
 
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The Knife's Husbando said:
I'll also add that his short stories are WAY better than his novels, IMO. "The Mist", "Apt Pupil" and "The Body" are some of my favorite stories of all time. He also writes pretty damn good non-fiction. "Danse Macabre" and "On Writing" were great.

And swerving back on-topic, has anyone else had what I call "Story Nostalgia Disappointment"? My best example is "Quest for the Faradawn." by Richard Ford. I read it ages and ages ago, and thought it was fucking magical. And then I ran across a battered copy at a used book store twenty years later & snapped it up....

Only to re-read it and realize it was just overwrought Ferngully/Avatar bullshit, with cardboard characters straight-up ripped off from the Redwall series.

:( I used to love that book.
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Steven King is very creative, and I really like his short stories, but the problem for me is that he spends far too much time on developing whatever place in Maine he's writing about in his novels. Salem's Lot took a looooonnnnngggg time to get started imho.
 
Abethedemon said:
Steven King is very creative, and I really like his short stories, but the problem for me is that he spends far too much time on developing whatever place in Maine he's writing about in his novels. Salem's Lot took a looooonnnnngggg time to get started imho.
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The worldbuilding in Salem's Lot is actually my favorite part of it. I felt more horror from the atmospheric sense of impending decay than I did from the vampires and genuinely thought that giving the vampire a face and a name and (utmost cringey) dialogue ruined the book for me.
 
Ruin said:
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.
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I agree to a certain extent. But his non-horror efforts vary in quality as well, and often suffer from the deficiencies found in his more popular work. For example, the black guy in Mr Mercedes is just embarrassing as hell.
 
Probably my absolute most favourite piece of contemporary literature is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It has little to do with the characters, nothing to do with the setting, and not very much to do with the writing style. I re-read it every year because I enjoy the plot. However much I enjoy it, I can't help but acknowledge how poorly written it is. Stieg Larsson, as far as I know, was a pretty respected journalist but as far as his fiction writing goes, maybe a series of crime novels wasn't the best route for him to go.

I do have to cut him a little bit of slack, he died right after delivering the manuscripts of the first three drafts in the series before he could - you know - edit them. Dragon Tattoo, even with it's weird writing style in translation and also it's tacked-on car chase scene is easily the best in the series; The Girl Who Played with Fire and Hornet's Nest are pretty bad in terms of plot. Then there was recently a new one by David Lagerkrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web - which is pretty much the whole "Eoin Colfer taking over for Douglas Adams" fiasco, and while Lagerkrantz can easily emulate Larsson's writing style (which isn't that big of a challenge), he makes the book even less interesting than The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I wouldn't know, I wasn't interested enough in finishing it.

My biggest quarrel, however, is with the translator who changed the titles to "The girl of this random thing who did some shit" instead of trying to stick to the original titles, like "Men who hate women" or "The Castle Made of Air that Exploded". The only book whose title is the same is The Girl Who Played with Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden for you Swedekiwis) and even then the title sounds campy and gurl power-y.

tl;dr - Larsson and Lagerkrantz are shit and if the former hadn't died of a heart attack he could have written better books.
 
Melissa Marr has always struck me as a horrible writer. She plays around with interesting concepts, yet it always seem to fall flat. Her characters are all Mary Sues and all the mains kept contradicting each other. Each of her chapters started with a really stupid quote too! I really wanted to like her Wicked Lovely series, since she tried so hard to paint an interesting world. But instead of expanding that world and giving the reader proper lore and making that world special, she just wastes her time on pointless romance.
 
IJustWantToSeeAttachments said:
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.
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Holy shit, about what she
show are you talking?

K>C said:
Kratman does have a huge Nazi boner, despite the fact he is Jewish enough to qualify for Israeli citizenship.
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It didn't look that way, when I read his "Caliphate" book. His islamophobia (the real deal, not islamophobia according to tumblrinas or CAIR) was over 9000, but I can't remember any overt antisemitism or sympathy towards Nazis, neo or not.
 
fuehrer_dessler said:
Holy shit, about what she
show are you talking?


It didn't look that way, when I read his "Caliphate" book. His islamophobia (the real deal, not islamophobia according to tumblrinas or CAIR) was over 9000, but I can't remember any overt antisemitism or sympathy towards Nazis, neo or not.
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Look at his Watch on the Rhine book.
 
K>C said:
Look at his Watch on the Rhine book.
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According to reviews I read, Kratman had no love for the antisemitism of the Nazis and didn't portray Jews negatively, he "just" had a (unwarranted) hard-on for the SS' military prowess and organisation.
 
Abethedemon said:
Steven King is very creative, and I really like his short stories, but the problem for me is that he spends far too much time on developing whatever place in Maine he's writing about in his novels. Salem's Lot took a looooonnnnngggg time to get started imho.
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King also has a tendency to insert a ton of crap that isn't very relevant or even just outright padding at times. The unabridged version of The Stand has a lot of boring crap I skimmed through to get to the actual scary parts, and after reading the book version of IT, the movie is a lot better because it excised a ton of stuff that was frankly irrelevant to the story at large (and excised some stuff that was totally fucked up in the "damn King, are you a pedofork?!" vein).

The entire fourth book of The Dark Tower is one long trip down memory lane to a bunch of events that could have been summed up in a few pages (and most of the relevant particulars were already referenced beforehand in much shorter backstory segments) and the actual plot that moves the story ahead fits in around 100 or so actual pages.
 
fuehrer_dessler said:
Holy shit, about what she
show are you talking?
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Legend of the Seeker.

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Cynical said:
The entire fourth book of The Dark Tower is one long trip down memory lane to a bunch of events that could have been summed up in a few pages (and most of the relevant particulars were already referenced beforehand in much shorter backstory segments) and the actual plot that moves the story ahead fits in around 100 or so actual pages.
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This is my biggest qualm with The Dark Tower series. Even by the middle of the second book King spends too much time on shit that could easily be covered in a few pages or just one chapter if he really needed to expound. If the reader gets to the end of your story and legitimately asks "why was _____ even included?" then you've done something wrong.
 
Personally I've never seen the appeal behind George R.R. Martin's works, and normally I enjoy a fantasy novel every now and again, but he doesn't really portray the typical fantasy tropes in a way that appeals to me. Anne Rice's novels also tend to be laughably predictable to the point where I'd almost take Twilight over that shite.

Oh, and let's not forget L. Ron Hubbard. I know everyone considers him terrible anyway because of Scientology, but Battlefield Earth and Buckskin Brigades were still boring reads for me.
 
Rize Kamishiro said:
Personally I've never seen the appeal behind George R.R. Martin's works, and normally I enjoy a fantasy novel every now and again, but he doesn't really portray the typical fantasy tropes in a way that appeals to me. Anne Rice's novels also tend to be laughably predictable to the point where I'd almost take Twilight over that shite.

Oh, and let's not forget L. Ron Hubbard. I know everyone considers him terrible anyway because of Scientology, but Battlefield Earth and Buckskin Brigades were still boring reads for me.
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Martin's whole deal is taking Tolkien, downplaying most of the fantasy, increasing the focus on the interpersonal interactions, then writing it all in the most grimdark way possible, and it often comes off as if the most grimdark edgelord from the W40K fandom decided to write in the same style for a low fantasy universe.

As for L. Ron, even at his best he was a schlocky author who basically churned out tepid science fiction (according to Robert Heinlein, who was a friend of his), and Hubbard's biggest flaw was that unlike Heinlein, who could flog his personal tastes in his work and still make it interesting (if fucked up), Hubbard's loved to exercise his pet peeves against psychiatry, taxes, and how no one took his crackpot IRL bullshit seriously in his fiction, and he often let any narrative quality play second fiddle at best.
 
Cynical said:
As for L. Ron, even at his best he was a schlocky author who basically churned out tepid science fiction (according to Robert Heinlein, who was a friend of his), and Hubbard's biggest flaw was that unlike Heinlein, who could flog his personal tastes in his work and still make it interesting (if fucked up), Hubbard's loved to exercise his pet peeves against psychiatry, taxes, and how no one took his crackpot IRL bullshit seriously in his fiction, and he often let any narrative quality play second fiddle at best.
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I sort of feel like he was trying and failing to be Issac Asimov tbh.
 
Abethedemon said:
James Joyce could be considered so bad, it's art. I'm a fan of his stuff, but it's pretty lofty and above everything.
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I can never tell if Joyce really meant anything by what he wrote, if it was merely an exercise in exploring his unconscious, or if he was just trolling the literature studies majors of the future.
 
I feel like the thread's alternating between 'worst' and 'most overrated.' I don't think it's a problem because the two topics fit well together (and literal worst would be pretty predictable) but possibly worth clarifying. Older authors mentioned here like Joyce, Tolkien, and Shelley are obviously gonna be overrated to some extent because of the way literature's evolved since they published. Also, in line with what @IJustWantToSeeAttachments was saying, I always got the impression that Joyce was the equivalent of the abstract art movement; that is, they can write well, but why bother when the late-19th-early-20th-century world is such a clusterfuck?

Anyway, for me it's
Most overrated - Palahniuk (more his novels than the short stories, which I like) + Bukowski
Most overrated today because of their literary footprint - Salinger + Faulkner
Worst popular, non-"guilty-pleasure" writer - Suzanne Collins
Worst author-turned-lolcow - James Frey (A Million Little Pieces guy)
Worst non-author in the industry - Tonja Carter (Harper Lee's agent + lawyer, got Go Set A Watchman published; details here)
Worst overall - Hitler, probably (apart from the obvious, his writing is incoherent + repetitive, and largely a ripoff of older antisemitic conspiracy theory propaganda)
 
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