Horrible / Literature

"Get away from the book by any means you can. Or, if you've been unfortunate enough to pay money for it already, fling it against the wall. It'll make a really satisfying thwack! when it hits. Just make sure no pets or toddlers are in the way."

— Smart Bitches, Trashy Books on "Top Ten Signs You're Reading A Very Bad Romance Novel" (archive.org link)

There are some books you pick up and read, then put down and never pick up again. These books, once you've read them, may make you want to hurl them against the nearest wall, or tear out every last page so that no one else can ever pick them up again. Nobody of any political affiliation would object to you burning these books in particular.

Important Notes:

1. Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
2. This page is not for horrible individual chapters of otherwise good books. For those, see DethroningMoment.Literature.
3. To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.

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Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

Authors

• Denise Brown Ellis published two children's fantasy novels, both allegedly co-written with her husband Larry Ellis. The below descriptions alone will make you glad she/they didn't publish any more (despite the "About the Author" section on Amazon claiming "[t]he couple has several books ready for publishing for children, teens and adults" and both books that did get published being advertised as the first in their respective series):
  • In 2010, she/they wrote The Adventures of the Teen Archaeologists: (Book 1) The Land of the Moepek. Full of bland powerhouses, dull conversations that have nothing to do with the plot, misuse of the word "sarcastically" and lots of grammatical errors.
  • ANTIGUA: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes^note No relation to the real-life Caribbean island. is just as bad. It's most notable for featuring at least as many exclamation marks as it does full stops. At one point, a character actually takes a train from Britain to England. The excerpt available on Amazon is So Bad, It's Good, but the novelty wears thin before long. It purports to be a teen novel, but reads like a book written for preschoolers due to its terse narration and dialogue. Denise blatantly advertised her/their book in review sections and insulted people who tried to give her advice. And there's a genuine, unironic 4-star review that was blatantly written by Denise, Larry, or somebody close to them.
• Dario Ford ^note real name Bozhidar Gospodinov; also known as Darko Ford has published several books on Amazon with others listed on Goodreads. ^note Skywalker/The Aliens and the Earth's Water, Ravenclaw, Dark Force, EMP Effect, Calabrian Vendetta, The Secret Side of the Moon (Calabrian Vendetta 2), Ethan and the Aliens, Who Are You, MR (sic) Rayne?, Star Wars: A Jedi On Earth, and 'Ndrangheta All are poorly-written and barely edited works that desperately try to emulate Terry Pratchett and Tom Clancy, without any of the intelligence, charm, or style. His books probably would have gone unnoticed — had he not tried to claim that Pratchett and Clancy co-wrote many of these books, that the former also contributed a foreword to Skywalker (in reality, the book apparently doesn't have a foreword at all!), and that Dark Force, EMP Effect, 'Ndrangheta, and A Jedi on Earth are officially-licensed Jack Ryan and Star Wars books, respectively. As you might guess, neither of them wrote a single word of any of Ford's books, there's no evidence either A Jedi on Earth or his Jack Ryan books are official, and Ford's attempts to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars and especially Pratchett and Clancy's deaths with half-assed stories is a disgusting joke. Ford has also given five-star reviews to all his books; on at least one occasion, he even posted two of them on the same book. At least two of his book covers also feature blatantly faked review quotes claimed to be from The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, as well as claiming to be published (again, without any evidence) by Random House.
• Michael Pearl is an infamous Independent Baptist pastor who, alongside his wife Debi, advocates the "Pearl method", a bizarre and horrific philosophy on family dynamics that can be summed up as "any family where the mother is anything more than the father's slave and accomplice in tormenting the children is Satanic". They primarily spread their beliefs through vanity-published guidebooks.
  • To Train Up A Child, published in 1994, is a parent's guide based on the "Pearl Method" but more commonly called a "child abuse manual". Among other things, it says beating your kids is not only okay but mandated by God; it recommends pulling a newborn's hair if they bite while breastfeeding; it lists the best methods and implements for hitting your kids without leaving bruises; it suggests that you trap your child and then punish them for falling for it; and claims that if you don't do these things, you don't really love your kids. Most of it also comes with highly questionable Biblical justifications. These methods have been proven to kill children, which is unsurprising given that the intent is to violently discourage normal child behavior, and makes the Christian aspects highly ironic given that the parents of those children ended up violating a Commandment. The Pearls (perhaps unsurprisingly) have called medical professionals and child protection services "the Gestapo" for their natural reaction to their methodology. It's no wonder Rational Wiki finds their stance on child discipline even more extreme than Hitler's. Rachel Oates dissects this book in two parts, and in the latter video she is clearly on the verge of tears.
  • Crafted to Be His Help Meet and its Spear Counterpart Created to Need a Help Meet are about marriage, and blatantly advocate Domestic Abuse. The Pearls preach total obedience in women toward their husbands, even if they're abusive, and that anything that goes wrong in a marriage is the woman's fault for not being obedient enough. The book fails to show any compassion for its readers, regularly resorting to such immature tactics as name-calling and fear-mongering. It's also indicative of subconscious homophobia in that the Pearls never consider the possibility of a person being created for a relationship outside one with the opposite sex. Libby Anne sporks the first book here, and Aletha does the second here.
• While Robert Stanek has written some passable-to-good nonfiction books ^note (mainly guides for Microsoft Windows computers under the name William Stanek; Robert is his middle name), his "bestselling fantasy novels" are more famous for their low quality and the ludicrously unethical tactics he used to promote them, including the use of Sock Puppets to pose as fans:
  • His main series, the Ruin Mist Chronicles, is full of typos, clichés, stilted dialogue, bad Purple Prose, Flat Characters who are uninteresting at best and unlikable at worst, and writing so awkward that it makes the bland plot downright incomprehensible. The "children's versions" of Ruin Mist are not rewriting the books into something kid-friendly, Stanek just split each of them in two and called it a day.
  • The Dark Path is supposedly a retelling of the Ruin Mist Chronicles from a different point of view. In reality, it's mostly content that was copy-pasted from the original series. The order of the scenes has been changed a bit, which just makes the plot even more confusing than it already was. Dark Path also contains several errors that were absent from Ruin Mist, which suggests that it was just an early draft of the latter published for a quick buck. Dark Path also got split in half and released as two separate books.
• Nigel Tomm is an "absurdist artist" who has acquired many detractors for his conceited, pretentious attitude. His works, in multiple media, aren't much better:
  • The Blah Story is the second-longest novel, contains the longest English sentence, and the second-longest coined English word. That sounds like it might be So Bad, It's Good, but the book replaces every other word with "blah blah blah", leading to sentences like "In a blah she was blah blah blah down a blah between blah roses blah blah blah her blah blah hair blah blah gently the blah blah trees..." The length alone should scare you — when you consider that Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time has 4,012,859 words, and it's made up of 15 Doorstoppers, and then see that The Blah Story has over 11 million words, you know you'll be in for a bad time.^note The claimant for longest novel, Mark Leach's Marienbad My Love, is over 17 million words and is generated entirely by Markov chain.
  • Scarlett Johansson Asked Artie Lange: "Are You Too Fat To Fish Some Natalie Portman?" He Answered: I Must Have Sex With Adriana Lima, Robin Quivers & Eva Longoria Parker As They're My Life Calendar, is just as bad. It's a lot like The Blah Story in that it replaces actual words with phrases like "tra la la", "taram pam pam", and "ha ha ha" so that the sentences (and thus the book) make no sense.

Publishers

• Several publishers try to make money by printing Wikipedia articles and then selling them — when you can just go online and get them for free. These books seem to be compiled almost entirely by machine, preserving any spelling errors and vandalism the original articles might have had and doing other truly bizarre things:
  • Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing claim to have published over 300,000 books — and they're all like this. Each book's cover claims it contains "High-Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA Articles!" Each book is titled after one of the articles in it, when there are several more unrelated articles, which is why Giving Circles contains the article on the United Kingdom (and also on giving circles, but that makes up a single page of the 108-page book). Its covers are epic failures; for instance, Fieseler Fi 167 shows a C-130, and 1867 Canadian Election shows the United States flag. Many of these books were only 40-50 pages long, and yet they sold them for up to $100. Although they were printed on demand, many of them were listed on Amazon as "temporarily out of stock". Thankfully, they stopped doing this in 2013.
  • Books LLC's Wikipedia Source series is as bad as Alphascript and Betascript, but with even weirder flaws. The articles are put together almost randomly, leading to incoherent descriptions and verbal diarrhea like "Gremlin Interactive Games: Loaded, Fragile Allegiance, Jungle Strike, Top Gear 3000, Harlequin, Body Harvest, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation". The presentation is given the barest minimum effort, with most covers just being made of plain words, like this◊. For copyright reasons, the original images are replaced with URLs pointing toward them. They also publish books with content from Fandom, formerly known as Wikia.

Standalone Examples

• 101 WACKY Computer Jokes by J.B. and G.C. Stamper is one of the worst joke books ever made, and that's saying something. Every single "joke" is a cheap, nonsensical pun based loosely around some computing term — for example, "What did the prisoner do when he got a computer? He ESCAPED!" (Get it? 'Cuz there's an ESCAPE key!) Its worst segment is the "Presidents of the Computed States of America", which is just the names of The Presidents of the United States turned into lame computer puns — but not all the presidents, just five of them. And all of them have their own page, with just the pun, not even an illustration. Seanbaby tore into this book in the third part of this Cracked article.
• 500 Manga Creatures by Yishan Li might have been a decent clipart/how-to-draw book... if you like blatantly-plagiarized Pokémon and Digimon artwork. Just by looking at the cover◊, you can see what is clearly supposed to be Caterpie, Dragonair, Hoothoot, Oddish, Latias, Cherrymon, and Mummymon, as well as (for some reason) Artemis, Whispy Woods from the Kirby franchise, the MS Girl version of Vigna Ghina, and a catgirl centaur stolen from a Deviantart gallery. Most of the reviews for it on Amazon point out how a good 90% of the artwork is blatantly ripped off from official Pokémon art.
• Die Abenteuer des Stefón Rudel (The Adventures of Stefón Rudel) is the German equivalent of The Eye of Argon or My Immortal IN SPACE! Lackluster writing, a morass of Plot Holes, poor pacing, flat or creepy characters — by golly, it's all there! The protagonist is Stefan, a six-year-old self-insert of the author, who is forced to flee with his parents from Mars to "World-Earth" (there's a "Main Earth", but it's only mentioned once). In the space of only a few months, he's adopted by Jacqueline Kennedy and then later by Hans-Ulrich Rudel, moves from Occupied Germany to "Itörnetie Plato 18", changes his name to Stefón, enrolls in the "Mars Centauri", picks up a ridiculous number of military ranks — on Earth and in space, and falls in love with several girls. While remaining six years old. This German guy MSTed the book, commenting that it reads like it's written by a child raised on old Flash Gordon comics, war films, military magazines, and German adult humor. German YouTuber ReziMafia shares her opinions on the novel here. Or head to Amazon to see for yourself.
• Alfie's Home (1993) is a vicious attack on homosexuality aimed inexplicably at children. It's about Alfie, a boy who's molested by his Creepy Uncle which, of course, makes you gay. However, he ends up being saved by conversion therapy (which had been discredited decades earlier and is in fact illegal in several jurisdictions). The boy's uncle, meanwhile, pulls a Karma Houdini. There are as many holes in the plot as there are in the logic. And the barebones, inconsistent illustrations defy all perspectives and could have been made in MS Paint; they look like drunken Schoolhouse Rock! concept sketches. And if that wasn't enough, one of the pages actually has a homophobic slur (you can probably guess which one) in a speech bubble! Infamous Sphere reads the book here.
• The Baldur's Gate novelizations by Philip Athans are a prime example of how not to adapt a video game to book form. The story is little more than a seemingly unending series of fight scenes; the original games' intrigue, story, and themes are not even touched upon. Many characters are introduced only to be killed pages later. The protagonist is an unlikeable and uninteresting jerkass who does little beyond have sex with various women and fight; he shows none of the interesting traits of the games' player character. Characters from the games are completely misrepresented: Jaheria becomes a Damsel in Distress who exists to have sex with the protagonist; her husband Khalid becomes a cruel Domestic Abuser; and Imoen becomes a depressed victim of the protagonist's bullying, and also has a pointless lesbian sex scene. Oh, and everyone praises the protagonist for no reason. The fanbase reviles these books, which got nearly unanimous negative reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads. Wizards of the Coast officially declared the novels Canon Discontinuity, and the writer of the final book, Drew Karpyshyn, lamented that there was little he could do to fix it after the mess made by the first two books.
• Berserk fans can be very argumentative on what constitutes good media, but Berserk: The Flame Dragon Knight is a rare case where very few fans are willing to defend it. Written by the screenwriter of the 2016 anime and focusing on the background of Grunbeld, a second-tier character from the manga's later run, the resulting story seems to embody all the worst traits of writers attempting to mimic the manga's notorious Crapsack World without the actual skill. The prose hovers between "blandly matter-of-fact" and "barely comprehensible", with frequent grammatical mishaps and the whole thing reading less like a story and more like a description of a more interesting one. Sexual violence is used insanely liberally (which given its source material is saying a lot), with a graphic scene of genital mutilation and multiple gang rapes happening in the first twenty pages, which pairs poorly with the Beige Prose (four sentences get dedicated to describing Grunbeld's penis at one point). Grunbeld himself is given almost no coherent motivation and few humanizing traits beyond "wants to fight things", and his Deal with the Devil, the moment the novel is supposed to be built around, breaks one of the major themes of the series by making his sacrifice not be an actual sacrifice. The only redeeming trait of the novel is that Kentaro Miura did illustrations for it, but even that's a bitter pill for many fans to swallow, as it meant his artwork was being spent on this project.
• Blood: The Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts by Mamoru Oshii is a continuation of the anime film Blood: The Last Vampire, which stars a vampire hunter named Saya fighting monsters. Given that the film involved a lot of blood, monster-hunting, and gory action, you'd think the book would be more of the same. Instead, the novel is less a story about vampire-hunting and more a clumsy collection of essays that fail to form any semblance of a coherent narrative. Rather than focus on Saya, the story focuses on a bland male student who goes from location to location listening to people have philosophical discussions and debates on increasingly uninteresting topics such as body disposal, the hunter hypothesis, and religious conspiracies. Saya, meanwhile, briefly appears only three times in the entire book and barely interacts with the protagonist, if at all. The novel is such an ill-conceived mess that one can only feel sorry for the translator who had to translate Oshii's incoherent and incredibly dull ramblings.
• The Book of the Ninja wins the award for the most useless martial arts manual of all time. It's a supposed "ninja manual" that includes "deadly fighting secrets" and cautions the reader not to kill people with them. But within are the most laughable "fighting techniques" in history; the book should caution that they could get the reader killed. The photos have nothing to do with the moves they depict and look more like vague limb flailing. It's also horribly put together; the photos are practically xeroxed on the pages, and the About the Author page devolves into a tangent about ninjas. This video does a pretty good job of tearing it apart.
• The Chalice of Origins from Isabel Canet Ferrer, is an attempt to cash in on the Young Adult novel boom years after it had ended. It stars a girl with facial deformities from an accident (Not that it comes up very often), who becomes the pivotal player in a battle between various Italian paintings as the sole wielder of the eponymous sacred weapon. Except all of this is just an excuse for Ferrer to show off her knowledge of art. Continuity, pacing, and dialogue are beyond-amateurishly rendered, the plot twists are so obvious that The Un-Twist would be less surprising, and the romantic subplot does little more than overtake the story. Its lasting legacy was that Ferrer became a laughing stock among readers and critics for chasing a trend that had long since gone by.
• The Chronicles of Blood and Stone series by Robert Newcomb was billed as the next big epic fantasy series by its publisher, Del Rey, and given all sorts of heaping praise by reviewers who were clearly both bribed into giving a positive review and incapable of reading the books themselves. The first in the series, The Fifth Sorceress, presents all women as either stupid and complacent or horrendously, disgustingly evil and corrupt, or both; it's essentially a series of one Deus ex Machina after another, and suggests that pregnancies last for somewhere between 24 hours and six months. It has several plot holes, like for example how the misandrist evil women encourage their male minions to treat women as slaves, the supposed heroes show criminal incompetence, especially the supposed wise old mentor, and there is far more buildup and payoff for a very fetishized rape of the protagonist than the actual final showdown. Frighteningly, the sequel is several dozen times worse in every possible way. Newcomb's follow-up trilogy The Destinies of Blood and Stone is the culmination of badness; the final book, Rise of the Blood Royal, includes a Cliché Storm so big that it makes Hurricane Katrina look like a breezy spring morning.
• Collectables: Guitars: Makes, Models, Stars is, even as a bargain bin picture book, not really worth the paper it's printed on. The book itself is very minimal in terms of information and doesn't show any full pictures of the instruments. The more you see incorrect dates of obviously modern guitars supposedly being created in 1955, the more you realize that they just didn't care. Take a look at a review of it here.
• Danganronpa Togami is a three-part Danganronpa Light Novel series which has the distinction of getting the franchise's perpetually Broken Base to agree on something — namely, that it's utter garbage. To describe the story is rather pointless, as whatever narrative there is gets filtered through a massive Random Events Plot that takes so many Ass Pulls as to become incomprehensible. The books are full of plot holes and nonsensical developments, some of them plot-breaking (a good example is when two characters somehow drive to the Czech Republic from Hokkaido, Japan). There's a large cast of characters, but the characters from the main series are heavily Out of Character, and the original ones are extremely one-note and unlikable; the intended Tragic Villain goes way too far over the Moral Event Horizon to be sympathetic, and the protagonist is probably meant to be The Woobie but instead comes off as a sycophantic Author Avatar. The story is filled with tons of references to literature and obscure history, most of which interrupt the story and make it come off as intensely pretentious, especially when the story interrupts itself mid-climax to brag about how good the author is. Oh, and if you came in wanting to read about Byakuya Togami, you don't even get that, as he spends the vast majority of the story Out of Focus. Its only saving grace is that it's gone completely ignored by canon, with several plot points contradicted in DR3.
• Diary of a Lonely Demon, by Jon David, is a classic example of an author using an obnoxiously perfect Author Avatar to push a hateful message. In a nutshell, the story revolves around one Jasper Davis, a wangsty self-insert who blames everything that's wrong with his life on evil women. Jasper then runs into Morgalla Smythe, a demon girl who apparently became a Christian thanks to her newfound boyfriend. All of a sudden, demons show up, and it's up to Jasper and Morgalla to stop them. It's ultimately an Author Tract on how women are wrong and how Jon is right. The author sets up a plethora of flat characters, adds a dash of blatant racism, sexism, and other offenses, and caps it all off with a metric shit-ton of grammatical errors and plot holes. Many passages are just copied from other works, and the author suffers from an inability to take constructive criticism properly.
• Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate is a book featuring dragons, cyborgs, firearms, and computers, which would normally be awesome, or at least awesomely stupid, but unfortunately the author ruined it with poor writing. The plot is incoherent, the characters are one-dimensional, and the clunky prose is full of thesaurus abuse. The author tried to make the main character seem intelligent by having him recite, learn, and muse over scientific facts, but they're all at most high school physics things which wouldn't impress anyone in a sci-fi setting (and he sometimes doesn't even get that right). While the book has a 3-star rating on Amazon, its 5-star reviews are either joke reviews or from suspected Sock Puppet accounts.
• Empress Theresa by Norman Boutin rose to infamy thanks to the author's numerous Dear Negative Reader diatribes and his insistence that the book is the greatest in human history. The book follows the titular Theresa, a 10-year-old child prodigy who merges with an alien entity referred to as HAL, giving her various superhuman abilities. The book's story is incomprehensible and flat, with plot holes big enough to drive a truck through, bizarre story elements (such as Theresa being revived after falling into the ocean by having the heat turned up), and bad pacing and grammar. The cast is flat and uninteresting - although Theresa is constantly praised as being perfect and virtuous, her actions paint her as petty and narcissistic (at one point eliminating winter because she doesn't like it), with the problems she faces being the result of her own carelessness. Down the Rabbit Hole's Fredrik Knudsen did an episode detailing how far Boutin went to defend and promote the book, and then devoted an entire livestream just to tearing the book itself apart. To further run the point home, KrimsonRogue has dedicated five videos worth of commentary, with even the shortest running just over an hour. He noted that over 400 pages, he could only spot two that didn't feature blatantly poor grammar or embarrassing writing.
• Two of several Friday the 13th books released in a deal between New Line Cinema and publisher Black Flame:
  • Friday the 13th: Hell Lake is a Doorstopper with pacing problems that completely derails Jason's character. The author uses stereotypes about him and ignores earlier canon in the process. Jason now hates sex so much, he'll drop what he's doing to kill some rapists and their victims. He now can teleport; just thinking about him apparently summons him. At one point, he appears to materialize from a television. Through an unexplained mental bond, he befriends(!) the secondary villain which serves almost no purpose past escaping from Hell. He also has a gang of goons following him around at several different points. He flays a guy and wears his skin and clothing as a disguise. (Ed Gein taught him how to in Hell. Yes, that's canon.) He screams in pain and throws tantrums when he's hurt, and in one sequence he mows down dozens with a hunting rifle. Most of the characters, who are from the backwoods New Jersey town of Crystal Lake, talk like stereotypical airheaded rich people (even the jocks!) and insult people by calling them "fool". And the author keeps referring to Camp Crystal Lake as "Lake Blood" instead of using the correct nickname "Camp Blood". Finally, if all of the above wasn't bad enough, have fun attempting to follow the extraordinarily confusing prose and figuring out just what the fuck is happening at any given moment. YouTuber SlasherPepper shares his thoughts on the novel in this video, in which he speculates that the whole thing was Christmas Rushed, as evidenced by a character's random Shout-Out to The Devil's Rejects, a film released only a few months prior to Hell Lake's publication.
  • Jason X: Death Moon often feels like the pretentious nonsensical ramblings of a stoner due to the author constantly going off on weird rants unrelated to anything, most infamously in Chapter 4, which is made up almost entirely of non-sequiturs, including a pages-long ramble about Bride of Frankenstein star Elsa Lanchester. Various concepts (Teknopriests? Akasha.net?) are introduced but never explained, and the story is unreadable half of the time because you can't tell what the fuck is even going on.
• The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-Squares Financial Statements by Dwight David Thrash is a 2016 novella in which the protagonist Titus Uno, Certified Public Accountant, Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and Chartered Global Management Accountant, is tasked to investigate a terrorist who blew up the 64-SQUARES skyscraper and stole its hard disks, as well as needing to get the company's finances back. Despite its short length, huge blocks of text are straight-up copy-and-pasted elsewhere while the main character has his full name and professional credentials referenced every single time he is mentioned as if the author was desperately trying to reach a particular word count. Typos and missing words abound alongside overall sloppy typesetting, a confusing story with several Plot Holes, and the extremely samey chapters will likely send you into some kind of endlessly looping hell. Everyone is incredibly boring, with more details going into their personal lives than their characterization, while the main character comes across as very egotistical even though he barely does anything of note. See KrimsonRogue get defeated by the book here and check out the 372 Pages podcast (starting at Episode 30) for an in-depth analysis.
  • The author also throws out the concepts of plot and characterization to explain accounting in mind-numbing, excruciating detail but as if it was being explained to a child despite the presumptive target audience. However, the reader is very unlikely to learn much about accounting considering what a huge slog it is to get past the non-existent action and its weird infantile, childish tone. Whatever details do exist, such as the chess championship outside of 64-SQUARES (bizarrely competing against loud carnival games for some reason) are never brought up again.
• From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Freedom and Global Justice by Madhavi Sunder, J.D. would barely even be a blip on the radar if not for YourMovieSucks.org and his multiple features on it, and it really isn't hard to see why. While its premise is somewhat admirable, arguing for greater recognition of intellectual property, it's poorly written and researched, littered with bias and Cowboy BeBop at His Computer. The real insult, though, is that its author is a law professor. See how much she gets wrong:
  • She goes on about how The Lion King supposedly plagiarized from Kimba the White Lion when she very clearly hasn't seen either work. She can't tell Kimba's Pauley Cracker (a parrot) from The Lion King's Zazu (a hornbill). She thinks they have the same "rocky terrain" as a setting, when Kimba mostly takes place in the jungle. She notes that both Claw and Scar are darker-skinned lions with a scar over their left eye — and misses the massive differences in their characters' personalities, as well as the fact that Claw is a much less prominent character than Scar. She notes that "Kimba" and "Simba" are similar, and fails to pick up on how "Simba" is Swahili for "lion". She claims that Kimba and Simba's fathers both had their ghosts appear as an image on the moon, even though the ghost of Simba's father Mufasa actually appeared in clouds.
  • She has a very clear pro-Bollywood bias; one chapter is devoted entirely to how Steven Spielberg allegedly stole the premise for ET The Extraterrestrial from an unmade 1960s Bollywood movie called The Alien. Throughout the book, she comes across as a xenophobic twit who hates Hollywood on principle and thinks that it is incapable of coming up with anything original.
  • Her use of sources is strikingly poor, especially for a lawyer writing about copyrights. Some claims are unsourced. Others come from things like poorly made YouTube videos. And some claims clearly come from uncredited sources, particularly the Lion King claims, which come from a 2004 book by Fred Patten. Imagine the Irony in a law professor accusing Disney of plagiarism having to plagiarize to support her claims.
• The official BradyGames Strategy Guide for Final Fantasy IX is universally hailed as the worst strategy guide of all time. Likely due to Executive Meddling from Squaresoft, the guide consists of extremely short sections with minimal detail that ask the reader to visit Square's PlayOnline website for the actual information. There's also a misprint during one of the Disc 2 boss fights, Lani, whose strategy is inexplicably replaced with the copy-pasted with one for the first mini-bosses in Disc 1 (but the website had the actual strategy to defeat her). This was in 2000 when many people didn't have access to the Internet, and those who did would be better off visiting GameFAQs anyway. When Prima did a 2015 omnibus re-release for the VII, VIII, and IX guides, it got a complete overhaul.
• Ghost Hunting 2.0: Breaking New Ground by Chris Bores (better known as The Irate Gamer) is supposedly about new methods of ghost hunting that he developed, but is actually just another testament to his already famously massive ego. The book is plagued with spelling, grammar, and formatting errors, which Bores openly defends as intentional. Most of the "facts" presented are contradictory and have little to no evidence, sourcing, or reasoning other than his own word that the experts are wrong and he is right. The majority of the tools and texts he brings up, which he claims no one else uses, have been used before — and thoroughly debunked as useless by professional ghost hunters (including peanut butter baits and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is an extremely-poorly-translated Buddhist self-help guide). He spends half the book referencing things like Batman and Scooby-Doo. He repeatedly brags about how he was at one point the 55th most subscribed person on YouTube, conveniently leaving out the fact that it was for his video game review show. And by the end, he declares that he has created a new branch of psychology. The book has a 3-star rating on Amazon, as actual critiques are counterbalanced by a flood of 5-star reviews written by the author's own spambots and defensive Irate Gamer fans who admit to not having read it.
• Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie, by Paul Spadoni (under the Pen Name Mabel Barr)^note a reference to the fictional book's author, Mabel Syrup, is a lazy, unlicensed Defictionalization of the Calvin and Hobbes bedtime story and a good reason to be thankful that Bill Watterson never discussed the plot in the strip. The story itself is unimaginative, the illustrations are crude, and it was likely published for a quick buck. Indeed, it's only eight pages long with a good chunk of the last page being an order form. However, a used copy as of this writing is being pushed for $650, which equates to over $80 per page. All of its positive Amazon reviews are from the author's hometown.
• Clifford Bowyer's deservedly-obscure Imperium Saga could rival The Eye of Argon for sheer bad writing, but it's worse for its characters tossing around the Idiot Ball every five seconds, to the point where it just isn't funny anymore. The first book in the series alone provides the following highlights:
  • "Legendary" Warlord Braksis sets an invading three-headed "tragon" on fire and watches it demolish a town in its death throes, then afterward decides it was a bad idea...but the people praise him for the destruction of their city.
  • Heroic groups of five fight off hordes of fifty or more without a single injury.
  • A sex scene uses "raging inferno" five times in three pages.
• Jokes for Minecrafters: Booby Traps, Bombs, Boo-Boos, and More, by Michele, Jordon, and Steven Hollow, is a notoriously bad yet fortunately unofficial Minecraft joke book. The jokes (tongue twisters, riddles, limericks, and haikus included) are either unintentional Anti-Humor (e.g. "What do you call a Creeper with a bomb in his hands? Doesn't matter; he will be blown to smithereens!", "How did the player keep from getting hurt while battling a blaze? He used a potion of fire resistance!", etc.), extremely weak puns, or otherwise lack proper punchlines (e.g. "What's funnier than a baby zombie pigman? A baby zombie pigman dressed up as Notch"). Some jokes are not even relevant to Minecraft, such as the constant use of bombs, something Minecraft never explicitly references. There's even a chapter of Minecraft sayings that functions as little more than Filler. The terrible illustrations do not add any sort of humor. In short, it's a failure of a book with a bunch of mundane statements passed off as "jokes" that even the youngest of kids would never find entertaining. Check a reader's commentary out here, or listen to the fine folks over at SootHouse take the piss out of it here.
• The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, by Nancy Stouffer, rose to infamy after Stouffer claimed that J. K. Rowling took inspiration from her book for her Harry Potter series. She filed a Frivolous Lawsuit on this basis, which she lost comprehensively and which drew interest in her works — and a realization of how bad they were. A small-time publisher tried to cash in on the scandal and did a small printing run, only to quickly go bankrupt. The Legend of Rah and the Muggles has so many blunders that a full list of them would at least double the size of this page, so here are a few handy plot breakdowns should you wish to subject yourself to them. Its main problem is that it can't seem to decide what it wants to be — it's equal parts dark apocalyptic drama, sickeningly sweet fantasy, children's Ghost Story, and fable about where stars come from (which mostly gets tacked on at the end). Very briefly: The protagonists are twins who, as infants, are sent away from a post-apocalyptic wasteland by their mother (who is never brought up again) and end up in the land of the eponymous Muggles. One of the twins is Always Second Best and becomes the antagonist, while his brother Rah is the nominal hero but doesn't care about his brother at all. The Muggles are grotesque, almost infantile creatures mutated by radiation. Their land is stuck in a nuclear winter — until the twins bring the sun back. Somehow. They also have a "lemonade lake" and a character who keeps changing ages. The plot isn't about Rah redeeming his brother so much as trying to defeat him — which is easy, because he does things like getting horrendously sick by keeping his hideout in a ridiculously irradiated tree. It reads as if nothing was planned out in advance, and everything ends up being ridiculous.
• List of the Lost is Morrissey's first foray into literary fiction and, self-evidently, should be his last. So unsalvageable, one critic compared hiring an editor for it to hiring "a doctor [for] a corpse that had fallen from the top of the Empire State Building." The story is of four high school track stars' fortunes turning sour after they kill and dump a homeless man. But the book is really about every single one of Morrisey's pet peeves, including Winston Churchill, The British Royal Family, the court system, the meat industry, and women in general. All else is anciliary; the plot follows no order and serves no purpose but to slot in Author Tracts, and there's no sense or characterization or even character voice. The story proper barely makes up a fraction of the 118 pages, compared to the in-character tirades. And despite its length, it's an excruciatingly dull and slow read, thanks to the at times nigh-unparseable Purple Prose. It begs suspension of disbelief that one of the most important lyricists in Alternative Rock history had ever picked up a pen before in his life. Seamas O'Reilly does a more thorough dissection of it than we're capable of here.
• Gloria Tesch rose to infamy thanks to her vanity-published series Maradonia Saga. The books themselves are styled as a "trilogy", but there are five of them^note A sixth book, Maradonia and the Battle for the Key, was advertised but never published. The first two entries are 700-page Doorstoppers, while the third only has about 400 pages; she then split up the first two books, and thus we get five. All the books are riddled with awful formatting, callous and self-absorbed protagonists, and a confusing story that plagiarizes from other far more credible works. Among the "exciting" plot elements are a talking grasshopper, an antagonist with a "Club of Evil" that sings "Mother Earth songs" and has a water park, and random use of the salsa dance. Tesch's father Gerry bankrolled her and backed her up with an army of lawyers and Sock Puppets to promote the books (and silence their critics). Tesch was billed as "the world's youngest novelist", even though people younger than her had published much better books before she did. Gerry even funded a film adaptation, which was also poorly received and appears to have bankrupted him. Impish Idea has a Spork of the entire series here. As of 2020, Tesch seems to have tried her best to suppress the series, effectively disowning Maradonia.
• Mass Effect: Deception is a tie-in book released in the months leading up to Mass Effect 3. Notably, it was also the first novel not written by the head writer Drew Karpyshyn. It was supposed to be a side story featuring the continuing adventures of Gillian Grayson; it wound up gaining the hatred of fans for its tactless treatment of homosexuality and autism, a list of research errors longer than IMDB's "Goofs" page for Battlefield Earth, and overall absence of anything resembling consistency or continuity. Not that it fared any better among non-fans — long, drawn-out chapters (often expository and redundant) were a common occurrence. Proofreading, however, was not. Publisher Del Rey openly apologized for the book (and promised to radically rewrite it, though it never happened).
• The James Vincent Murphy translation of Mein Kampf took something already derided as being overly long and hideously thick in its original form and somehow made it worse. The writing style was changed drastically, alterations and expansions were blatant and hackneyed, and spelling and grammar were all over the place. The book resembles some bad fanfics of the original. Its clunky, dull, flowery prose results at least partially from the author's habit of looking up the words he didn't know in a German-English dictionary and picking the first definition he saw. It was submitted incomplete; Murphy changed his mind about the Nazis and fled Germany, meaning the press had to finish the translation. Perhaps fortunately, the few copies that the Nazi press produced were lost until 2008, effectively destroying any chance for this abomination to become anything more than a bizarre curiosity.
• Mermaid's Kiss and Siren's Song is a poorly disguised Final Fantasy VII fanfic published on Amazon. All the characters are thinly-veiled Expies and one-dimensional, there's Rouge Angles of Satin everywhere, and rather disgusting metaphors are used to describe a character's hair in the first chapter alone. One piece of evidence to the novel being a Final Fantasy VII fic with the names changed is how one character, named "Gamba Dumey", is at one point referred to as "Gamba Dumey Wallace". As for the rest of the novel, the reviews speak for themselves.
• Mortal Kombat: Deception was a fine game, but its official strategy guide from BradyGames was almost unreadable, and not entirely because it's anyone's guess whether it was even proofread. It spends a lot more time on fighting strategies than stage mechanics, which is pretty useless for a fighting game—the guide outright has nothing to say about the Courtyard. The Konquest section is terribly organized, and clearly based on an early build as none of the information given is remotely correct. Neither the Fatalities nor the Krypt, two major draws of the game, are described in any real detail. Its attempts at hiding Ghostly Liu Kang are too little, too late, disclosing pretty much everything about him but his name. And the extras are pointless; the fold-out with character bios is practically all wrong, and the Kombat Kodex, meant for an online service, never actually saw use.
• "Nerd Porn Auteur" by Ernest Cline (known for Ready Player One) is a supposed poem, but to call it poetry would be a crime against language, for not a single line scans in any way. Every single line has a different number of syllables from the ones before or after it, and no attention is paid to the natural rhythm of speech, so it definitely isn't free verse either. The only way it could be passed off as poetry is by having nonstandard line breaks. If that weren't bad enough, the entire poem is just a "Nice Guy" complaining about girls sleeping with jocks instead of people like him; despite claiming to dislike the objectification of women, he does so himself without any self-awareness. It's included in the poetry collection The Importance of Being Ernest (not to be confused with Oscar Wilde's classic play), all of which fails at being poetry, resembling blog posts with random line breaks about subjects ranging from Airwolf to Nostradamus as your roommate to cunnilingus — but "Nerd Porn Auteur" stands out as the worst. After some time, Cline himself eventually came to agree with the criticism and wrote a scathing Self-Parody poem to show he no longer held these attitudes.
• No Touching, by Aileen Deng, was commissioned by the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, who would kindly like to forget it ever existed. It was intended to promote awareness of asexuality and debunk common myths about it, but the writer is incredibly ignorant of the theme and can't convey correctly what little she gets right, giving us a Cliché Storm that makes you want to scream to the protagonist "Stop Being Stereotypical". What little enjoyable stuff this tome has is ruined by the unpolished writing and inconsistent characterization. Elizabeth the Gray's review goes into more detail.
• Org's Odyssey by Duke Otterland is a Cliché Storm of a fantasy novel about Org of Otterland, a hero born from the daughter of a god who must save Anglia from evil. The beginning explains how the Anthropians came to be, but it comes off as Purple Prose. Moreover, the battles are unfair — the good guys outnumber the evildoers seven to one. See the reviews here.
• The Overton Window by Glenn Beck is a thriller about how awesome people like Beck are fighting left-wing extremists— except it wasn't written by Beck at all, but rather ghostwritten by Jack Henderson, who in 2005 wrote a very similar novel called Circumference of Darkness where the bad guys are right-wing lunatics. That would be forgivable if the story itself was good, but that isn't the case. It has been called one of the worst works of literature ever written; the Los Angeles Times called it less a train wreck than "a lurching, low-speed derailment halfway out of the station", and the Washington Post is inclined to agree, as is Cracked. José describes its awfulness here. How terrible is the prose? Here's an excerpt:
  "these liberated chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mysteries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes."
• The Doctor Who New Adventures story The Pit by Neil Penswick is commonly regarded as the worst Doctor Who novel of all time, not least because of the tedious nature of the story, which is written entirely in Beige Prose. The Doctor is completely useless and does virtually nothing throughout (which was part of a larger New Adventures Story Arc that is taken way overboard in this novel) and Bernice Summerfield acts completely out of character, coming across as cold-hearted and irritable. Legendary poet William Blake appears as one of the main characters, but is completely wasted as a character and just spends most of his time complaining about the situation he's in. Worst of all, the whole thing ends up being one giant "Shaggy Dog" Story, making it even more infuriating to have to sit through the bland and confusing storyline. Fortunately, you don't have to read through the whole thing; this prologue (originally published in Doctor Who Magazine) illustrates its main problems well enough.
• Pokémon and Harry Potter: A Fatal Attraction by Phil Arms is the worst of the many books designed to warn frightened parents about hot new franchises. Despite the name, most of the book is about Pokémon, with Harry Potter only getting a single chapter. Arms clearly knew nothing about either franchise and admits outright that he's never seen, read, or played anything from either one, apparently getting most of his information from internet forums dedicated to criticizing them. He seems to think that you can kill, maim, and steal in a Pokémon game (when in fact you can't harm human characters in any way, the only violence in a Pokémon game is the fights between Pokémon and even those are never fatal), and that Pokémon and Digimon are the same thing (a clear indication of someone who doesn't know what he's talking about). Although the average Amazon review is sitting at a 4.1, most of the five-star reviews are obviously written by trolls.
• Reaper's Creek by Greg Jackson, better known as Onision, is his third foray into literature. While his first two books were bad, this is much, much worse. In it, a boy named Daniel is abducted by aliens and given powers — first, he can just sense dead bodies, but he gets so many more New Powers as the Plot Demands that he becomes more powerful than God and fights him. Almost every challenge he faces is resolved instantly, and anything resembling real difficulty comes off as artificial. Daniel is a borderline Sociopathic Hero who goes against his own moral code in the blink of an eye, such as when he kills a Serial Killer and his accomplices (including the one who was blackmailed into doing it). There's a graphic sex scene between Daniel and his girlfriend, when he's 12 and the girlfriend is 16. There are various grammar and spelling errors, and perhaps the most telling is one where Daniel is accidentally referred to as "Greg". It's so bad, Krimson Rogue did a two-hour rant on it and dubbed it worse than his known Berserk Button, The Twilight Saga.
• Das Reich Artam by Volkmar Weiss is an Alternate History set in a victorious Nazi Germany which even exists more than 100 years later. If you think this could be problematic to write, you'd be right — while he doesn't say so outright, the author seems to have a bit too much sympathy for the Nazis and not too much for their democratic successors who wreck the Reich. Add some soft porn for "controversy" and a scene about developing Newspeak copied almost word-by-word from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and you've got a stinker for the ages.
• The Robot by Paul E. Watson is a self-described "wildly improbable male teen fantasy" in which two awkward high school friends, nerdy Gabe and Dover, discover a Robot Girl named T.R.I.N.A. in the secret laboratory in Gabe's father's basement. They mistakenly activate the robot when trying to have sex with it, and it escapes. Then they set out on a quest to foil an assassination plot against Dr. Phil. The characters are all stereotypical Jerkasses, especially Gabe and Dover. The dialogue mainly consists of tired clichés and crass sex jokes. The subplot where Gabe tries to connect with his father falls flat because he's an extremely mean-spirited father (who after everything that happens still grounds Gabe at the end). Every chapter begins with an inspirational quote that has more or less nothing to do with what happens in said chapter. Ridiculously enough, the book is intended for 12-year-olds.
• The Sacred Seven by Amy Stout is a deservedly obscure fantasy "epic" which is nevertheless only novella-length. The plot's a Cliché Storm in which a Big Bad Evil Sorcerer is trying to take over the world and playing MacGuffin Gotta Catch Them All. The attempts at "originality" are things like forest dwarves and the Big Bad being a female elf leading a troll army instead of the traditional orc army. But what makes this book special is that it has over two dozen point-of-view characters over its meager page count in a large font. Most pages have at least one POV switch, which can be to a character in a completely different geographic location having completely different adventures. As you might expect, nobody of the large cast of characters has much of a detectable personality. The whole thing reads like an internet round-robin written by a bunch of teenagers.
• Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden, vanity-published by Victoria Foyt, claims to be "the next Hunger Games" with its premise of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, taking place in a world where white people ("Pearls") are the disadvantaged minority and black people ("Coals") are the dominant majority. Despite being purported as a book with an anti-racism aesop, the book instead ends up coming across as racist. Ridiculous lengths and liberties (particularly with its use of science to explain why black people are at an advantage) are taken in a transparent and ineffective attempt to make the white characters (and whites as a whole) more sympathetic. The protagonist at one point has to use paint to disguise herself as a "Coal", leading to a promotional video featuring an actress in blackface. And the book as a whole is ham-handed and devoid of any real effort, even when it's taking batshit turns such as the "love" interest (a Scary Black Man who is also the initial antagonist) becoming a panther man via genetic splicing. The book is currently rated 1½ stars on Amazon, with strong evidence that the handful of positive reviews were faked.
• La Septima M (The Seventh M) is the first published book by Chilean author Francisca Solar, a YA/paranormal detective novel about the investigation of a series of strange suicides in southern Chile. The main characters are an impossibly beautiful and talented young female forensic investigator (whom the author calls a "Thanatologist" in one of the worst cases of Separated by a Common Language in the Spanish language) who has an unspecified disorder and takes medication with vaguely defined and inconsistent effects, a detective with No Sense of Humor whose investigative capacities are more of an Informed Ability, and an obnoxious photographer who was intended as Plucky Comic Relief but comes as The Scrappy instead. The location reeks of Chile is Naziland, every bad police procedural cliché is played straight, the "mystery" is practically ripped off an X-Files filler episode, some of the very tense situations happen in Hanna-Barbera cartoon style (including what may be the worst attempt at playing the Scooby-Dooby Doors for drama), Plot Holes abound, and the Idiot Ball is passed around like a volleyball match. All the former and the very purple and pretentious writing would make the book hilarious in other circumstances, but here they dogpile to slog the text and infuriate the reader. A sequel (named El Hada de las Cadenas, "The Faerie of Chains") was eventually written and published, but the editorial decided to release it as digital-only — which was its death-knell, as Chile is not a place where digital content is widely sought after.
• Bob Chipman's Super Mario Bros. 3: Brick-by-Brick touts itself as the definitive analysis of Super Mario Bros. 3 but fails in every way. Right from the start, it's bogged down by a badly-told history of the franchise that encompasses almost the first third of the book, random tangents that have nothing to do with anything, fringe far-left political opinions that even most leftists would disavow and are also completely irrelevant to the topic, stories from Chipman's personal life that might be interesting if not for Chipman coming across as highly immature and egotistical (with statements likening the reveal of SMB3 in The Wizard to the JFK assassination and the Nintendo/Sega Console Wars to Vietnam becoming memetic, and not in a positive way), spelling and grammar errors that betray a lack of copy-editing, and massive amounts of ego-stroking. As a piece of analysis, Brick by Brick fails as the portion describing Super Mario Bros. 3 consists of dull steps-by-steps descriptions of every level in the game broken up by the occasional personal musing, with preciously little attempt to go beyond surface-level observations or describe what makes it tick as a game. There's a reason he has since disowned it, along with all of his other books. The book has a 2.20 on Goodreads, with the top reviewer saying they'd rather stare at a vase or eat sand than read the book. You can listen to Terrible Book Club discuss the book here, or watch MagicMush dissect the book and its contents here. ProcrastiTara also reviews the book here, where she dubs it worse than Onision's books.
  "I recall reading about the author who was hired to write the novelization of the first Halo game saying that his book was a series of passages about Master Chief running and shooting because he was hired to write the book version of Halo and that running and shooting was all he saw in the game. The author of this book similarly wrote about only running and jumping, but sells itself as finally being THE book to treat games with a trained critical eye. This is not a book of game criticism. I say this as a person who has written numerous articles and a book on critical analyses of game environments, levels, and worlds for respected publications. Super Mario Bros. 3 deserves better than this lazy effort."
• Touched by Venom by Janine Cross, better known as The "Venom Cock" Book, would have barely been a blip if not for the Internet. The closest one can get to a plot summary is to say that Dragonriders of Pern, Gor, and The Clan of the Cave Bear get thrown in a blender with extra helpings of pain, suffering, and sex with dragons. It takes From Bad to Worse to ludicrous degrees: The Dragon Temple screws Zarq's serf enclave out of all their worldly possessions on a technicality? Sell Zarq's sister into sex slavery to buy food and supplies. Mom schemes to get her back? The scheme backfires, resulting in Dad's execution and Mom and Zarq's banishment. (Also, Mom's pregnant, and they're kicked out immediately after she gives birth to a son she's not even allowed to hold.) They find refuge in a convent that houses old dragons? Just in time for Mom to drop dead! Then Zarq has to undergo "circumcision" to be considered "clean and holy". The nuns hold fertility rites with the old dragons. And that just takes you halfway through the book; after that, the damage spreads to people other than Zarq. To Cross' credit, she never tries to pretend that it's anything other than a Crapsack World, and the sequels (while not good) are a significant improvement and explain many of the baffling plot points in Venom, but the book doesn't stand on its own.
• Troll is a self-published "romance" novel by Emma Clark. The writing is incredibly creepy (sexual assault and blatant stalking, including breaking into someone's house, is treated as true love), the pacing is terrible (it takes until the second-to-last chapter for there to be an exposition on the characters or any semblance of a plot), the prose is awful, the author seems unaware of the logistics of hacking and social media culture, and there are just so many other problems. Jenny Nicholson rips it apart here; despite often enjoying reading bad fiction on her channel, she has to take a break while reading this one because the love story makes her legitimately uncomfortable.
• The World Rose, a self-published novel by former Countdown champion Richard Brittain, rose to infamy after he drove several hundred miles to assault a young woman for giving a negative review, but beyond that, the book itself is just bad — it's dull, full of superfluous wording of a fuchsia hue, and the characters within are bland Mary Sues, particularly the main female character. It has an average review score of 1.72 on Goodreads with 350+ ratings and 100 reviews. However, what truly makes it despicable is the fact that the main character was purposefully based on a woman he had stalked from his university days who wanted nothing to do with him, even giving the character the same name and writing a detailed blog post about a planned PR stunt that revolved around tracking down this woman and faking her kidnapping (unsurprisingly, she not only declined but was disturbed that Brittain had managed to track her down). Said main character is sexualized enough that the woman who was assaulted by the author called her "boobilicious" in her review.

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