Stylistic Suck / Literature

• Older Than Print: Geoffrey Chaucer had his Author Avatar in The Canterbury Tales tell the bizarre story of Sir Thopas, a hyperactive Belgian child who spurs his horse until it's a bloody mess. The host cuts off the parody in the middle to complain that it sucks.
• Daniel Keyes's novel Flowers for Algernon is written in the form of Charlie Gordon's journal. The early (before his intelligence was enhanced) and late (after the effect wears off) entries are written in a barely-literate style indicative of Charlie's mental deficiency.
• In Treasure Island, the character Dr. Livesey takes over narration of the events on ship while Jim off on the island, doing so in a very tedious style.
• In Henry Fielding's novel Jonathan Wild the various crooks and prostitutes usually speak in a gentle style, but it's essentially implied that Fielding is "translating" their speech for ironic effect, and in one instance, a love note written by Wild is produced which has attrocyous spelng errerz.
• Stephen King:
  • The End of the Whole Mess, the writer's skill deteriorates as his mental capacity does.
  • Misery:
    • The main character, Paul Sheldon, spends most of the book writing a new book in his popular Misery series, and the writing style, while not really worse, is somewhat different. The format of the book within the book also changes as the character's typewriter decays — it begins in regular type, then a few letters become handwritten, until by the end the entire manuscript is written by hand.
    • When Paul is writing his first draft of the new book. Paul utterly despises the Misery series but is trying to provide his "number one fan" with everything he thinks she loved about the series, including over-the-top, melodramatic dialogue and one-dimensional characters.
  • The Dark Half: The main character's dead pseudonym comes to life and goes on a killing rampage until the main character agrees to help him write one last novel. That novel begins all right, but by the second chapter, every other word is "sparrow" (sparrows being an ongoing theme in the overall novel.)
  • "Survivor Type": The main character is surviving through unusual means on a barren rock island. He uses heroin to anesthetize himself, and it shows in the journal he is keeping.
• Mario Vargas Llosa's semi-autobiographical novel La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) has a structure where intercalates a chapter telling the protagonist story with another being the argument of one of the radial Soap Operas written by the eponymous scriptwriter Pedro Camacho. While the protagonist story is told in a very consistent style, the "Soap" chapters are written in a more grandiloquent style, although not actually truly bad written. These alternate chapters detail the events going on in the various radio soap operas written by the scriptwriter, who are already very convoluted and filled with a lot of Author Appeal and Author Avatar meddlings, but become increasingly bizarre as the plots of the separate soap operas start to merge, all thanks to the increasingly unstable mental state of Camacho due to burnout.
• Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief features portions of the novel the protagonist is writing, entitled Glove Pond. It's written in a somewhat stilted style, with a bizarre plot and characters and themes clearly based on the author's own life and issues. It's sort of hilarious and pathetic at the same time.
• A recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut's books is Kilgore Trout, a failing sci-fi writer. The readers are treated with short depictions of his books.
• Inverted in Tad Williams's short story Writer's Child in that the main narrative is purportedly written by a seven-year-old girl using exactly the kind of style you might expect while the excerpts of her father's writing are on another level entirely. Also, the story is not comedy but horror.
• Caversham Heights, the unpublished novel where Thursday Next takes refuge in The Well Of Lost Plots is described as being "of dubious merit" and the scenes we see being made bear this out. The novel's main character Jack Spratt worries the whole thing will be deleted.
  • A delicious bit of metafiction, as in all of Fforde's work. At the end of Well of Lost Plots, Spratt's novel is entirely changed by taking on characters from nursery rhymes. The book itself was later published in real life as The Big Over Easy. This is inspired, because The Big Over Easy was in fact the first novel Fforde wrote. After getting it rejected by many editors, he instead wrote The Eyre Affair, first of the Thursday Next books, and it was the success of this that got his original novel published as well. Not content to just publish it, though, he actually wrote it into the main series! And the real novel itself is far from bad, being widely praised, so this ends up a sort of circular subversion.
• Adrian Mole at some point wrote a book called "Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland". In which the protagonist writes another novel, entitled "Sparg from Kronk" (in which the protagonist... writes "a book without language", meaning Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend ended up writing a book about someone writing a book about someone writing a book about someone writing a book). Somehow, both books manage to be even worse than they sound.
• Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is full of this, most notably in the forms of a cheesy family film called Cashiered (with an ending that surely caused nightmares to the fictional audience), a bad rock band who wish they were The Beatles, and an "ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" called The Courier's Tragedy, which is basically period Gorn.
• The Sound and the Fury. The first section is written from the perspective of a mentally disabled man who moves in and out of flashbacks with no warning, giving no expospeak of any kind and making it ridiculously difficult to figure out the setting or the character relationships. The second section of the book is written by a student having a nervous breakdown who is apparently opposed to the sentence and constantly refers to something that he well knows never happened. Then it gets comprehensible, but the third section is about such a monstrous person that it's just a different sort of difficult.
• Roger Solmes' writing style in Clarissa. He can't spell.
• The Warhammer 40,000 Ciaphas Cain novels take the form of Cain's unofficial personal memoirs, which are pretty good. Unfortunately, because of Cain's very narrow focus (he never discusses anything which doesn't DIRECTLY affect him) the editor of these memoirs regularly finds it necessary to include extracts from other sources to fill in the context. Many of these are very poor, especially the extracts from the memoirs of Jenit Sulla, a retired general who served under Cain in her youth. The editor considers Sulla's writing to be so bad that she apologizes every time she is forced to refer to it, and regularly encourages readers to skip the extracts if they feel like it. In the first book, information on the history of Gravalax is conveyed through a book called Purge The Unclean!, which claims to be an "unbiased" view of things. The writing is almost a parody of the typical Imperial line as expressed elsewhere in the 40K universe, and the author has a fanatical hatred of rogue traders; Vail frequently cuts off the excerpts when he starts blaming them for what's gone wrong.
• This is the central conceit of The Iron Dream; Hitler is writing the novel within a novel, Lord of the Swastika, as his brain is rotting away from syphilis. The story is a mess of very Deliberate Values Dissonance, a Cliché Storm plot that makes little sense, repetitive and bland prose, and weird, vaguely fetishistic imagery.
• The short story "Witness for the Prosecution" by Q. Patrick is narrated by a scary, possibly slow 11-year-old whose writing is characterized by minimal punctuation and a consistent pattern of misspellings.
• Isaac Asimov's story Cal features the eponymous robot's quest to become a writer, aided by having various modules installed. At first his stories are textbook examples of this trope, but the last story he writes avoids this (and pisses off his master enough that his master tries to have all the upgrades removed). As a bonus, the story is about a demon called Azazel... That's right: Cal finally became a good enough writer to copy Asimov.
• In the Captain Underpants series, George and Harold write and draw (well, George writes and Harold draws) their own comics, with each book having at least one comic for a chapter. The art and spelling is, to put it simply, sub-par. Their Mirror Universe counterparts, however, draw comics which have superior art and spelling. The normal-universe George and Harold think it's awful.
• Edgar Allan Poe:
  • "The Fall of the House of Usher" has the horrendously trite story "The Mad Trist". The narrator introduces it as "one of [Roderick's] favorite romances", all the while thinking to himself that he only said this to calm Roderick down and that it's a miserable excuse for a romance; he's only reading it because it was the closest book at hand.
  • A Predicament, preceded by the context-setting short story, How to Write a Blackwood Article. In Blackwood, a magazine editor tells Upper-Class Twit Psyche Zenobia the secrets to writing a "sensation" story about madness and death — in other words, a story not unlike some of Poe's own work. Psyche then goes on to produce a stunningly terrible story filled with mangled foreign quotations, Narm, and a graphic but implausible description of the narrator's decapitation.
• Both Atlanta Nights and Crack of Death were written for submission to PublishAmerica, to test their claim that they were a traditional publisher instead of Vanity Publishing. They were both written by a group of authors writing as badly as they could from a minimal outline. Both were accepted, but after the hoax was revealed, PublishAmerica suddenly backed out. Naked Came the Stranger was written for a similar, but more ambitious purpose—to see how well a "bad" book would sell if it had a lot of gratuitous sex. Pretty well, as it turns out. The working title of Atlanta Nights was Naked Came the Badfic.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy uses this trope with regard to the three worst examples of poetry in the universe. Subverted in the radio, print, and film versions; which give no examples of the absolute worst (that of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, or Paul Neil Milne Johnston, depending on the version, of Earth) or of the second worst (that of the Azgoths of Kria). The third worst, that of the Vogons, is actually included; but in a form which makes sense in-universe while being complete gibberish to the reader. Played straight in the television series, which includes intelligible examples of the first and second worst as screen text during one of the animated Guide sequences.
• The World According to Garp features several of T.S. Garp's works. On the whole... not so good.
• While stories aren't usually told in this fashion in the Discworld books, the semi-medieval fantasy setting is played realistically in that the vast majority of people are illiterate or semi-literate, and things like spelling, grammar and punctuation haven't really been standardised yet. Thus, any in-story written document is either in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe or written like a kindergartner.
  • Discworld has also named the Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma trope.
• The Black Company novels are supposedly the annals of the eponymous mercenary company, and each Annalist puts his own spin on recording events. When one Annalist was sick, the Company's wizard had to fill in for a few chapters, and his writing was terrible.
• How NOT to Write a Novel includes sample passages at the beginning of each section to clearly demonstrate every faux pas the authors wants people to avoid. Though they are exaggerated for comedic effect, they aren't that exaggerated — the reason for this book being written in the first place was co-author Howard Mittelmark having worked in publishing and rejecting manuscripts with these very problems over, and over, and over...
• Jennings's attempt to write a detective story:
  Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots rang out. Two policemen fell dead and the third whistled through his hat.
• Noel's poetry in "The Story of the Treasure Seeker's" by E Nesbit, even though the other children think he's a gifted poet.
• The last two chapters of the novel "Aliss", a macabre retelling of Alice in Wonderland, degenerate into a succession of laconic sentences always ending with an ellipsis. Since the book is written in first person, it's understandable that the style of writing would change after Aliss has been beaten. And shot. And raped.
• House of Leaves is full of this and arguably competes with the above-mentioned The Sound And The Fury as one of the defining examples of Stylistic Suck in literature. Each narrator for each of the five layers of narrative have their own specific breed of Stylistic Suck. You might want to get comfortable:
  • The Navidson Record, the innermost story, doesn't have a narrator but is transcribed secondhand to us, being a found footage movie about the Navidson family moving into a bizarre Haunted House. It's a genuinely haunting and fascinating film, but also absolutely filled with long stretches of nothing happening, realistically awkward dialogue, Jitter Cam, and a generally directionless atmosphere, all on top of the fact that it'd have to be five hours long at minimum. This is all offered as evidence that it's genuine and not just a movie, as the Law of Conservation of Detail is completely and utterly flouted, along with pretty much any other storytelling mechanics; it's like really watching these people go about their actual lives, with all the boring down periods, lack of exposition, and general messiness that implies.
  • The second layer is a dissertation on The Navidson Record written by an amateur film critic and self-proclaimed scholar named Zampanò. Zampanò tries really hard to act the part of a Renaissance Man and mostly fails catastrophically, with other characters comparing his work to that of a college freshman who'd get a C- at best. His writing style is smug and self-assured, with him constantly trying to impress with irrelevant precision, overly-lengthy quotations, equally overlong summaries of basic subjects, and expressing his subjective opinions as objective fact, which is all made worse by a tendency to meander off topic while trying to convey his insights. He also makes a lot of spelling errors and weird formatting choices that hurt the readability of his work. A lot of the problems are only present because the essay as-read is a rough draft that Zampanò was still working on, leading to yet another expression of this trope when you reach multiple sections that were heavily foreshadowed and hyped up as vital to understanding what's going on, only to find placeholder notes from Zampanò reminding himself to write those sections.
  • The third layer is the annotations and journals of Johnny Truant, a drug addict who finds Zampanò's manuscript and decides to stitch it together, while adding in his own research and additions. His writing actually starts out quite decent, but slowly degrades in quality as his mental state and personal life worsens over the course of the novel. He becomes prone to long, rambling diatribes that bleed together and gets much sloppier in terms of spelling and formatting, while also letting his personal diary entries overtake both his own annotations and Zampanò's paper, leading to nonsense like major plot developments in the lower layers being interrupted by Johnny bragging about getting laid. This is compounded by Johnny taking on an increasingly adversarial tone with the reader, attacking and mocking them in his writing, as well as being an Unreliable Narrator of the worst kind who openly admits to regularly lying about what he says happened.
  • The fourth layer is a series of letters sent to Johnny by his mother Pelafina, who is a paranoid schizophrenic committed to a mental health facility, commenting on his life and journaling her own. Her early writing is perfectly coherent, but as she gets older, her mental illness worsens significantly because of her treatments failing for some reason, and her writing goes down the drain with her mind. Her letters become full of manic rambling, swinging back and forth between raving about the conspiracies she hallucinates everywhere and apologizing for her actions and words when she regains lucidity. Her spelling gets worse as well, and the coherency of her words dissipates slowly but gradually.
  • The fifth and final layer comes in the form of the Editors of the publishing house, who have received the insane manuscript formed from the four other layers and been given the unenviable task of putting it all together. They invert this trope. Unlike all the madness in the other narratives, they are sane, normal, and professional people and it shows in their writing, which is competent, clean, and succinctly efficient. They genuinely try their best to present the reader with all the available facts in a way that's understandable. Their work is obviously made difficult by the nature of the other layers, and there ends up being more than one situations where they just throw up their hands and say "your guess is as good as ours". In general, their attempts to apply a Mind Screwdriver to the novel are admirable but unsuccessful. Good luck figuring it out yourself.
• Near the end of The Terror by Dan Simmons the main doctor's journal entries become increasingly incoherent as he slowly dies of an overdose after being Driven to Suicide.
• In the Smoke and Shadows trilogy, the main cast is constantly beset by all manner of supernatural shenanigans, from evil wizards to demons, and the main character, Tony, has an even longer history including everything that might possibly go bump in the night. But no threat of death or insanity is worse than when their reality gets as vapid and cliched as the horrid Vampire Detective Show they all work for.
• In The Pale King, part of Chapter 24 is taken from the packet of IRS orientation materials for new hires, which Wallace states is the reason for the dead, bureaucratic flavor of the narration.
• Lenskiy's romantic poem in Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a Cliché Storm.
• In the Time Scout series, most things in the past were handmade, and most people paid attention to things like clothes and weapons. Therefor, a scout's, guide's, or tourist's gear has to mimic the imperfections of handmade equipment.
• Mark Twain loved this trope. Consider the writings of Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (Averted in a notable scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—after we're treated to the hilariously dreadful essays and poetry of the girls at Tom's school, Twain admits that he got them all from an actual book.)
• The romance novels of Rosie M. Banks in P. G. Wodehouse's books.
• Push by Sapphire. The spelling is phonetic and the grammar is similar to speech patterns found in African American Vernacular English ^note  AAVE is also referred to as Ebonics instead of conventional written English. Her spelling, grammar and overall writing improves as she is placed in a class catering to people with difficulties in reading and writing.
• In the Agatha Christie short story collection The Thirteen Problems, each story is narrated by a different member of Miss Marple's circle. Mrs Bantry insists she has no talent for storytelling and doesn't understand how the others do it. She demonstrates this by describing the bare facts of the case in a single paragraph and saying she can't go any further without giving away the solution. The bulk of the story consists of the other characters patiently asking questions in order to get details like the names of the suspects or the existence of a Love Triangle.
• A variation: In Letters to His Son, British statesman Lord Chesterfield deliberately writes in a way to demonstrate how not to write English: "MY LORD: I HAD, last night, the honor of your Lordship's letter of the 24th; and will SET ABOUT DOING the orders contained THEREIN; and IF so BE that I can get that affair done by the next post, I will not fail FOR TO give your Lordship an account of it by NEXT POST. I have told the French Minister, AS HOW THAT IF that affair be not soon concluded, your Lordship would think it ALL LONG OF HIM; and that he must have neglected FOR TO have wrote to his court about it. I must beg leave to put your Lordship in mind AS HOW, that I am now full three quarter in arrear; and if SO BE that I do not very soon receive at least one half year, I shall CUT A VERY BAD FIGURE; FOR THIS HERE place is very dear. I shall be VASTLY BEHOLDEN to your Lordship for THAT THERE mark of your favor; and so I REST or REMAIN, Your, etc." (EMPHASIS as in the original)
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • The short story "Voice from the Vortex" by Gareth Roberts in Doctor Who Magazine is a parody of the lousy stories in the sixties and seventies World Distributors Doctor Who annuals, with appalling artwork, a nonsensical plot, and characters called "Dr. Who" and "Rosie Taylor" (who wears a mod dress and beehive). It also features constant glaring inaccuracies, like the time machine being called Tardis and having a rectangular console and making a beeping noise when it takes off; and writing the Ninth Doctor (a terse, witty Mancunian) with the same speech patterns as the First Doctor (a fearsome and formal old man), describing him as wearing a cloak and handbag and being chubby, and having him carry a gun and cry for no reason. On top of that the prose is riddled with malapropisms and basically ugly verbal constructions and ends with An Aesop that has nothing to do with anything that happened.
  • The Angel's Kiss Starring Melody Malone is written in an over-the-top Campy Private Eye Monologue style with painfully unsexy sexy bits, and occasionally stops the plot dead to focus on in-universe Author Appeal elements, like the fashion, and how sexy and fashionable all the male characters are and how much they all fancy Melody Malone, and how sexy and fashionable Melody Malone is.
• In The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling by Lawrence Block, the MacGuffin is a Fictional Document called The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, which is supposedly rare and valuable because it's so bad that, after recovering from his Filibuster Freefall, the author destroyed as many copies as he could in shame. To prove that he has the book, Bernie has to read out passages, which are appropriately horrible.
• A character in Love Dishonor Marry Die Cherish Perish gives a toast in poorly metered, ostensibly rhymed verse. It is the only part of David Rakoff's Verse Novel in which a character is overtly reciting poetry except for a brief quotation from Oscar Wilde, and the only horrible poetry in the book.
• I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is made of this trope. It's the "autobiography" of the character Alan Partridge, and his writing style is sheer torture. He particularly abuses That Makes Me Feel Angry and Cliché Storm, changes tenses semi-randomly, misuses words, lies all the time and invents unbelievable embellishments, informs the readers whenever he does anything he considers clever with his writing, at one point plagiarises Wikipedia, and gives long and painfully elaborate descriptions of irrelevant details such as the exact physical way that he opened an envelope containing his A-level results. There is nothing good about his writing whatsoever.
• Older Than Feudalism: Eumolpus in The Satyricon, an absolutely awful poet who is nevertheless convinced he is a genius philosopher. We hear plenty of his bad poetry throughout his sections of the story, and it is so bad that other people usually pelt him with rocks to make him stop. It was probably a parody of now-lost Roman poetry the contemporary audience would have recognised.
• The dialogue to Charlie's play in Clocks that Don't Tick is nothing short of terrible. The very real violence that occurs after said dialogue makes it stand out even more.
• The fictional poet Jason Strugnell, created by the very talented poet and parodist Wendy Cope, mimics the style of the great poets, but has a tin ear for imagery that results in him either using inappropriate metaphors (calling the sun "the glorious Football in the East" in Strugnell's Rubaiyat) or using high-flown phrases to describe his very ordinary life in a London suburb.
• Room by Emma Donaghue is told from the perspective of a five year old boy. The novel is filled with intentionally bad grammar and sentence structure, to truly emphasize the narrator's mindset.
• The Hunger Games: Whether or not the books' prose style actually sucks is up for debate, but either way, it was purposeful; the excessive usage of fragments and the occasional lack of description is supposed to emulate the narrating voice of a barely educated teenage girl in a present-tense Stream-of-consciousness fashion.
• In Piers Anthony's novel Firefly; to repay in part Geode's kindness to her, Oenone tells him stories she invents on the spot. One time when she is not available he dreams she is telling him a story and it's in a completely different style, very disjointed and nearly incomprehensible. In the Author's Afterword Anthony says it was written by a man imprisoned for pedophilia.
• In Drawing A Blank, Carlton's comic book of Signy the Superbad occasionally appear between chapters as he draws them. The artwork and dialog are stilted, the plot is thin, and most the female characters are improbably large-breasted, i.e. just the sort of comic book a teenager might draw for fun.
• The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of Stylistic Suck, writing under the pen name P. Sørensen-Fugholm, a fictional amateur poet and laundry owner. Fugholm's poems are goldmines of comical misspellings, tortured rhymes, Sophisticated as Hell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) double entendres. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "Mr. Dictator Mussolini, Italy",^note which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time whom he lauds as "the greatest organist of our time" for the way he and his "faksists" put an end to the "koas" in Italy. He gushes to the big man about how:
  as glowing fire from your eyes did shoot
  all flabbiness you tore up by its root

and wishes that Denmark be sent a Mussolini too, because:

the pointless nonsense flourish in our land

as you will know if you have read my poems.

Tra-la-la!

• In The Machineries of Empire, the dramas that Cheris is watching are troperiffic to the point of being unintentionally (at least in-universe) hilarious.
• The parody newspaper Trangviksposten (Narrowbay Daily or something like that) was a hilarious parody of Norwegian narrowmindedness, presenting a fictional town to the east of Norway, including no less than two poets who both fit the trope - one male, and one female. The last one, called Thora Berg, who wrote under the nome de plume Bergthora, became memetic, and lended her name to a Whole genre of Norwegian "housewife poetry".
• Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor has two examples:
  • A famous author mentions writing such a novel in the past, before he'd developed his writing skills. The unpublished manuscript was so bad that he remained as a ghost after he died, afraid of someone else reading it. We don't see any samples of the writing, but it's described as a parody of the typical plot of many Light Novels: a main character who's inexplicably powerful, has a harem of girls despite being antisocial, is able to easily persuade a villain to atone, and is showered with praise by others.
  • Sistine writes her own novel, and this is shown to the reader. The main character's name is "Mistine", she's beautiful and intelligent, she has numerous men in love with her while not showing interest in them, and among these men is her own teacher. Said teacher (who is blatantly based on Sistine's actual teacher whom she's Tsundere towards) even says that he'd prefer to be called "Mistine's beloved one" instead of his actual name.
• REAMDE: Dodge has hired a very prolific fantasy author to crank out spin-off novels for his Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The author is described as a hack several times before we see an example of his writing, and it's got humorously Purple Prose.
• In Children of the Lens, our hero Kimball Kinnison has to pose as a Space Opera pulp writer. We get an excerpt of his work which manages to be even more hammy than anything else E. E. "Doc" Smith could come up with.
• Many—maybe even most— of the conversations in Catch-22 are far too long, repetitive, disjointed to the point of being nonsensical, and generally end up going absolutely nowhere (or even backwards). It's all too easy to see how a perfectly normal person could go completely insane just by hanging out with Yossarian and his comrades.
• Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor features snippets of "Luke Skywalker and the Jedi's Revenge", an in-universe biopic/period piece retelling the events of the movies. It was made without the permission of Luke or anybody else that took part in said events, and it shows; Ham and Cheese acting all over, the sort of writing you see in every crappy "the Empire did nothing wrong" fanfic ever made, and historical inaccuracies so mind-bogglingly offensive it somehow warps back around to being hilarious (Anakin Skywalker is depicted heroically dying in defense of the same little kids he brutally murdered in Revenge of the Sith). Oh, and it's also a Propaganda Piece created by Cronal as phase one of an Evil Plan to take over the galaxy. Apparently good filmmaking is not one of the unnatural abilities the Dark Side grants people.
• The Lord of the Rings is intended to resemble mythology and ancient chronicles. This leads to some confusing moments: like when Gildor Inglórion introduces himself as "of the House of Finarfin", as if he expects that to mean something. Many first time readers will stop and go scouring through the book to see what they've missed: but the answer is nothing. Nor does this detail matter for the story. It's a deliberate violation of the Law of Conservation of Detail, for the purpose of style. Though if you simply cannot continue reading without knowing, the answer to your most burning questions can be found in the Appendices. This is a common thing in myths, a character will introduce themselves as being related to a character who isn't part of the current story: but the audience would be expected to know. Except here, the real audience doesn't know. However, the story isn't written for any real audience: not only does its author exist in the fictional world, but its intended audience does as well. While this leads to some very weird narrative structure, it also has the rather nice side effect of not making any reader feel excluded or included. Again, the point here is to invoke the feeling of this being mythology. It makes the act of reading the text feel almost rebellious in a weird way, precisely because it doesn't cater to you...whoever you might be.
• Harlan Ellison wrote "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman partly as a protest against conventional "rules of good writing", and run-on sentences are not uncommon in the story.
• Stick Dog: All of the drawings are done in a very primitive style. All the dogs are drawn with the same boxy body type to highlight it. The drawings of humans are more detailed, though.
  • The same applies to the Stick Cat series. Though Stick Cat's head is drawn as a circle, the same for Edith's head and body.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: A lot of fictional work Jaine comes across is so clearly terrible.
  • "Do Not Disturb"^note Styled and even eventually published as "Do Not Distub" from Killer Cruise is a prime example. Jaine is forced to edit the manuscript of a crewman named Samoa to keep Prozac's being on the ship a secret. Long story there. Anyhoo, the thing is a woefully ridiculous tale of a steward who foils a terrorist plot while performing his steward duties. The tale has him disarming a nuclear device with a plunger, the protagonist is clearly based on him (his name is Samoa Huffington III) as a Gary Stu with a huge penis and ends with him riding off in the "Samoa mobile". For a kick in the ass, it becomes a New York Times bestseller and gets a movie adaptation starring Antonio Banderas (albeit with them describing it as absurdist literature).
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Do-It-Yourself book features comic strips by some of the characters. Most of them fall under this. In Rowley's strip Action Fighterz, the only action was one character hitting the other with a Frying Pan of Doom. The rest of the page is just them discussing what's about to happen.
• One of the running gags in The Finishing School Series is Agatha's habit of wearing very fancy and expensive dresses that are exactly the wrong cut and color for her. It isn't until the revelation near the end of the fourth book that Agatha has been in service to Lord Ackledama - who is notorious for having particularly good fashion sense even for a vampire - since she arrived at the school that Sophronia realizes that Agatha had been picking such tacky dresses on purpose to encourage even her friends to underestimate her.
• Done in-universe to make a point in The Footprint of Mussolini. When the Soviet Union attempts a Moon-Landing Hoax, the editor they choose for the resulting film, Pavel Klushantev, is disgusted with the leaders of his country for sinking so low. In response, he deliberately botches the job, making it blatantly obvious that the film is fake.
• The children’s book 45 + 47 Stella Street and everything that happened is framed as if it were a true story written by its first-person narrator, 11-year-old Henni Octon. The story does things like randomly switching between past and present tense, and sometimes has Henni’s narration go on tangents about writing the book (such as one instance where she fixates on the use of “cried” as a dialogue tag).
• "Born Of Man And Woman" by Richard Matheson is written as if it were the journal of a monstrously deformed (literally) child who is kept locked up in it's parents basement and abused by them, treated like an animal and hidden from the world. The resulting text is about what you'd expect from an insane, inhuman, and childlike creature who has received little to no education or proper rearing whatsoever; their language and writing is awful, with almost nonexistent grammar, bad punctuation, and equally terrible spelling, as well as a lot of odd synonyms and turns of phrase born out of the child having very little knowledge of the outside world (e.g., it refers to other children as "little mothers and little fathers", an extension of using "father and mother" as terms for gender).

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