I don't literally mean Sharknado of course, but what I mean is the kind of book where the premise is completely ridiculous to downright idiotic. The kind of book where you know with every fiber of your being that it did not take a genius to write, but is still thoroughly entertaining for the sake of being exactly what it is.
Of course, I don't want it to feel like a middle schooler wrote the thing, I still want it to be a fun and engaging read. But if you're at all familiar with that impulse to watch a bad disaster movie simply for the sake of it, you know exactly what I'm talking about!
I just read Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw, an apocalypse novel about a city flooded by a 3 foot layer of man-eating jam (no meaningful spoilers, that's literally described in the first sentence of the book) and it did a very good job of nailing the vibe this post is about.
Also to get ahead of this, Dungeon Crawler Carl does not meet this criteria, it's too legitimately well-thought out. Yes it's silly at times and yes it's fun to read, but it's not the vibe I'm looking for.
by PsyferRL
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The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Croshaw’s repeated use of “Frank’s dead…from the jam” in Chapter 1 had me howling
*Sarong Party Girls* by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. The premise is that a lower-middle-class girl in Southeast Asia wants to snag a wealthy expatriate boyfriend before she ages out of her 20s, so that she can have “the Chanel of babies” with him. Of course, it’s meant as satire, but the joke doesn’t always land.
The “John Dies at the End” series by Jason Pargin/David Wong might fit the bill.