Which author/book has the worst prose that you’ve ever came across?
Me and my friend were talking about this the other day. We both thought that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code had awful prose and therefore absolutely hilarious. We couldn’t think of any others that jumped out as being particularly bad so I’m interested to hear about some more terrible prose! Especially if it’s particularly funny.
by GlitchDowt
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I’ve used “it’s giving Freida McFadden” to describe how much I hated a book’s writing before, so…
Blake Crouch
Harry turtledove’s supervolcano:eruption is unintentionally hilarious! It’s like the prose version of a b movie with dubbing.
I’m going to absolutely get downvoted to hell for this but I absolutely hate how Gideon the Ninth was written. Sure the vernaculars is… ahem… *demographic-specific* and I anticipate it to age like milk, but I also think the prose itself also very unimaginative and unstructured.
Stephanie Meyers and Danielle Steel.
Haven’t personally read them, but my partner felt this way about A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas. Her and her friend used to read them out loud and laugh.
Ironically—Nina Prose
Many of Catherine Coulter’s novels made me laugh at least once with their stilted prose.
It has to be 50 Shades of Grey. Have you ever tried reading that garbage?
The two Brandon Sanderson books I read (Mistborn and Steelheart) were poorly written. I know he’s very well known for his world building, etc. but on a sentence level, the writing is terrible.
With Mistborn I still remember how he overused the word “maladroitly” to describe a character’s action. You could turn it into a drinking game lol.
Anything by Ayn Rand
Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist is terribly written. I can only assume everyone that loves it has read a translation done by a much more talented writer.
James Patterson. I put the last one I tried to read down after 3 pages.
*Shining Through* by Susan Howatch
I’d seen the movie, and while it wasn’t a good movie, it was entertaining. I figured I’d give the book a try, and what I found was a convoluted mess with no discernible plot, ridiculous characters, and dialogue like “You’re the traitor in the Resistance!”
Honestly, I’m kind of impressed with how the movie turned out.
Where the Fourth Wing haters at? Man, I wish I had the book so I could give some examples, but I remember it had some of the cringiest stuff I’ve ever read.
Edit: Aiite, I found some examples. Look at this shit.
“I’m so fucked.”
“Mira’s never done arguing with Mom, and the frustrating thing about it is that Mom has always respected her for it. Double standards for the win.”
“Envy clenches my chest.”
“Scraping the rain from my face with the leather on my shoulder, I glance back to see where Jack is.”
“And I bet you feel pretty badass right now, don’t you first years?”
Gone with the Wind is pretty bad.
Fourth Wing, it felt like a prank
I did not like Arnaldur Indriðasons first novel. True, it was his first published novel and therefore he may still have to hone his craft, but the way he tries to integrate exposition: it felt amateurish.
I think it’s because it was written by two people, which must be difficult, but The Personal Librarian felt like it was written by a high schooler. Which was disappointing because the topic and the story were really interesting, but the writing with distractingly bad. (That said, I got an ARC of Marie Benedict’s book coming out next month, The Queens of Crime, and it’s fantastic.)
Fight club. I’m so sorry, I’d imagine it would have seemed quite raw and edgy pre-social media.
Dean Koontz’s later works, especially “velocity” is a little egregious 😅
This is How You Lose the Time War was a rare DNF for me. I know some people enjoy the …*decadent* writing style. But I think there’s a balance between decadence and “writing so far up its own butt that it found the thesaurus it crammed up there”.
I made it 30 percent of the way through and couldn’t force myself through the rest. This passage sticks in my mind:
>Blue approaches the temple in pilgrim’s guise: hair shorn to show the shine of circuitry curling around ears and up to scalp, eyes goggled, mouth a smear of chrome sheen, eyelids chrome hooded. She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack, and her arms are braceleted in whorls of gold, silver, palladium, glinting brighter than bright against her dark skin.
Seen from overhead she is one of thousands, indistinguishable from the slow press of bodies shuffling towards the temple: a borehole in the centre of a vast, sun-baked pavilion.
>No one enters it: Such worshipful heat would wither their god on its silicon vine. But inside is where she needs to be.
>Blue drums her key-clapped fingers against one another with a dancer’s precision. A, C, G, T, backwards and forwards, bifurcated, reunited
Anything written by Alice Feeney – every other paragraph has some ridiculously cliche statement about the world like ‘sometimes good people have to do bad things’ or ‘we all hide the ghosts from our pasts’ or some other stupid phrase like that. Even blends them into people’s dialogue. Drives me nuts.
Star of the Sea by O’Connor. The prose is so overwrought it reminds me of when I used to write short stories as a middle schooler thinking I was brilliant, or when Calvin waxes philosophical in the comic.
Anything I’ve read by Nicholas Sparks.