History StylisticSuck / Literature

* OlderThanFeudalism: Eumolpus in ''Literature/TheSatyricon'', an absolutely awful poet who is [[GiftedlyBad 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. [[WeirdAlEffect It was probably a parody of now-lost Roman poetry the contemporary audience would have recognised]].

* This is the central conceit of ''Literature/TheIronDream''; Hitler is writing the novel within a novel, ''Lord of the Swastika'', as his brain is rotting away from syphilis.

** "Literature/TheFallOfTheHouseOfUsher" has the horrendously trite story "The Mad Trist".

* A character in ''Literature/LoveDishonorMarryDieCherishPerish'' gives a toast in poorly metered, ostensibly rhymed verse. It is the only part of Creator/DavidRakoff's VerseNovel in which a character is [[LiteraryAgentHypothesis overtly]] reciting poetry except for a brief quotation from Creator/OscarWilde, and the only horrible poetry in the book.

* Both ''Literature/AtlantaNights'' and ''Crack of Death'' were written for submission to [=PublishAmerica=], to test their claim that they were a traditional publisher instead of VanityPublishing. 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.''

* ''Literature/TheHungerGames'': 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 StreamOfConsciousness fashion.

* "Tight embrace of the Oak tree": holds up all romantic trops to mockery: there is a brutal macho, sarcastic ardent feminist, "sex, dr...inking, rock'n'roll" and intentional IKEAErotica.
* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[UsefulNotes/FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] 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:

* ''Literature/IPartridgeWeNeedToTalkAboutAlan'' is made of this trope. It's the "autobiography" of the character Series/AlanPartridge, and his writing style is sheer torture. He particularly abuses ThatMakesMeFeelAngry and ClicheStorm, changes tenses semi-randomly, misuses words, [[UnreliableNarrator lies all the time]] and invents unbelievable embellishments, informs the readers whenever he does anything he considers clever with his writing, at one point [[PlagiarismInFiction plagiarises]] Wiki/{{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.

* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[UsefulNotes/FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] 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 t the big man about how:

* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[UsefulNotes/FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] 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 about how:

* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[UsefulNotes/FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] 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 how:

--> all flabbiness you pulled up by its root

--> the mindless nonsense flourish in our land

* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[UsefulNotes/FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] whom he considers "the greatest organist of our time" for the way he and his "faksists" put an end to the "koas" in Italy. He also wishes that Denmark would get a Mussolini, because:

* 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.

* OlderThanFeudalism: Eumolpus in ''Literature/TheSatyricon'', an absolutely awful poet who is [[GiftedlyBad 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. [[TheWeirdAlEffect It was probably a parody of now-lost Roman poetry the contemporary audience would have recognised]].

** ''A Predicament,'' preceded by the context-setting short story, ''How to Write a Blackwood Article.'' In ''Blackwood,'' a magazine editor tells UpperClassTwit Psyche Zenobia the secrets to writing a "sensation" story about madness and death -- in other words, [[SelfDeprecation a story not unlike some of Poe's own work.]] Psyche then goes on to produce a stunningly terrible story filled with [[BlindIdiotTranslation mangled foreign quotations]], {{Narm}}, and a [[{{Gorn}} graphic]] but [[YouFailBiologyForever implausible]] description of the narrator's [[BloodlessCarnage decap]][[MadeOfPlasticine itation.]]

* 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.

* The ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' Literature/CiaphasCain ('''HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!''') 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 [[PurpleProse 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 [[GeneralRipper fanatical hatred of rogue traders]]; Vail frequently cuts off the excerpts when he starts blaming them for what's gone wrong.

* "Literature/TheFallOfTheHouseOfUsher" by Creator/EdgarAllanPoe has the horrendously trite story "The Mad Trist".
** But everything else pales in comparison to the masterwork of bad writing, ''A Predicament,'' preceded by the context-setting short story, ''How to Write a Blackwood Article.'' In ''Blackwood,'' a magazine editor tells UpperClassTwit Psyche Zenobia the secrets to writing a "sensation" story about madness and death -- in other words, [[SelfDeprecation a story not unlike some of Poe's own work.]] Psyche then goes on to produce a stunningly terrible story filled with [[BlindIdiotTranslation mangled foreign quotations]], {{Narm}}, and a [[{{Gorn}} graphic]] but [[YouFailBiologyForever implausible]] description of the narrator's [[BloodlessCarnage decap]][[MadeOfPlasticine itation.]]

* In the Creator/StephenKing story ''[[Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes The End of the Whole Mess]]'', the writer's skill deteriorates as his mental capacity does.
** Stephen King also did a version of this in his novel ''Literature/{{Misery}}''. The main character, Paul Sheldon, spends most of the book writing a new book in his popular [[ShowWithinAShow 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.
** The 'novel within a novel' is actually something of an inversion of this trope as, while the format does disintegrate, the actual story is actually a well-written, gripping narrative which the main character comes to prefer to his supposedly 'serious' writing.
*** ''Literature/{{Misery}}'' also has a completely straight version of this trope when Paul is writing his first draft of the new book. Paul utterly despises the [[ShowWithinAShow 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.
** And he did it again in ''Literature/TheDarkHalf'', where 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.)
** And again in the short story [[Literature/SkeletonCrew Survivor Type]], in which the main character is surviving through [[ImAHumanitarian unusual means]] on a barren rock island. He uses heroin to anesthetize himself, and it shows in the journal he is keeping.

* ''Literature/{{Push}}'' by Sapphire, later adapted into the film {{Precious}}. [[FunetikAksent 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[[/note]] instead of conventional written English. [[spoiler: Her spelling, grammar and overall writing improves as she is placed in a class catering to people with difficulties in reading and writing.]]

* Thomas Pynchon's ''Literature/{{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 Music/TheBeatles, and an "ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" called ''The Courier's Tragedy'', which is basically period {{Gorn}}.
* ''TheSoundAndTheFury''. 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 [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible 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.

* Both ''Literature/AtlantaNights'' and ''Crack of Death'' were written for submission to [=PublishAmerica=], to test their claim that they were a traditional publisher instead of VanityPublishing. 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 Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] whom he considers "the greatest organist of our time" for the way he and his "faksists" put an end to the "koas" in Italy. He also wishes that Denmark would get a Mussolini, because:

* The ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' Literature/CiaphasCain ('''HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!''') 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 [[PurpleProse 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.
** It should be noted that almost all extracts of certain events, written by military personal, are in similar purple pose writing style (the editor even comments once about how good it is that a certain admiral hasn't written his memoirs yet). This could hint that most officers think that they have to write in that style and that Cain's "I don't care if someone ever reads this" feeling about writing these memoirs are the actual reason why they are so well written. Also, in Sulla's case, you can almost guess that she really thought the way she wrote.
*** The Imperium heavily edits the memoirs of imperial commanders in order to make them more in line with the fiction they spout, about how humanity is infallible, peerless in every way, and the most cultured species in the universe. So it could be more like Cain's memoirs, where the parts written by the author are somewhere on the cutting room floor or in inquisitorial libraries. It's also stated that Cain's memoirs that were released to the public are also in the same style. Maybe the imperial editors are just bad at writing?
** 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 [[GeneralRipper fanatical hatred of rogue traders]]; Vail frequently cuts off the excerpts when he starts blaming them for what's gone wrong.

* The Danish poet Per Barfoed (1890 - 1939) was a master of StylisticSuck, 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, SophisticatedAsHell, and unintentional (and frequently risqué) [[DoubleEntendre double entendres]]. A high point is Fugholm's homage to "[[BenitoMussolini Mr. Dictator Mussolini]], [[FascistItaly Italy]]",[[note]] which parodies the widespread fascination with fascism in intellectual circles at the time[[/note]] whom he considers "the greatest organist of our time" for the way he and his "faksists" put an end to the "koas" in Italy. He also wishes that Denmark would get a Mussolini, because: