Worst Books You Have Ever Read

It is a great satire of the dehumanising effects of capitalism.

I nominated The Eight Doctors because I knew the worst book I had read would have been one of the Doctor Who/Star Wars/Star Trek books I read when I was younger. That one stands out as particularly egregious because it is just a series of nostalgic callback sequences hackishly pasted together, and as I don't really get nostalgia, it seemed like an annoying waste of time and a particularly boring way to launch a new range of novels for a new Doctor. It doesn't help that the Seventh Doctor's curiously decent (by tie-in merchandise standards) novel range ended abruptly so we could have that crap, too. Thankfully Lawrence Miles came along later to salvage the Eighth Doctor Adventures.

I read more crap books as a kid than I do now, which is odd as I read a lot more now. I guess I'm better at gauging what I'll like. I think some of the current crop of weird fiction writers are overly lauded and too quickly put on the same pedestal as genuine innovators of the form for doing pastiche work, but none of them have struck me as bad so far. Laird Barron often gets a kicking on here, but I think he has written some great stories. I suppose Derleth's Mask of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu would be the worst 'supernatural horror' books I remember reading, although I was a huge Goosebumps fan as a kid, and in hindsight many of them were probably poor.

[waffles]

The Catcher in the Rye

[ToALonelyPeace]

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
-People who read this book will either like it or hate it, but I hate it because it tears me apart on the first page. I couldn't read further. There's also a movie and it's brutal.

The Secret Life of Bees
It's one of those coming-of-age book I was forced to read.

The Book Thief
Everyone loves this book, but I hate it. It's 300+ of fluff then wham bam! ending. Then everyone cries about how tragic it is.

[beetlebox]

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I foolishly was caught up in the hype when everyone seemed to be reading it.

Dreadful pile of nonsense that seemed to be written by a child with attention deficit disorder...
"and then this happened, then this other thing happened, but suddenly this happened and ...ooh, wait, need a baddie, I know, an albino monk - well scary, then that happened and it was like well cool and then some code stuff that confused everyone except the hero, cos he was well smart innit and then more cool stuff happened...."

[Murony_Pyre]

-The Weird O' It by Clive Pemberton
A collection of slight, short-sighted, narrow-minded tales of terror.

-House of Blood by Bryan Smith
I rarely follow up reading recommendations from people I hardly know but, for whatever reason, I'm sad to say I followed up on this one.
It was like reading a preteen trying desperately to shock and repel with curse words and misogynist pornography and only coming off as **yawn**.

-The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
Genre blending at its very worst. I'm surprised by the ongoing popularity of this book but I guess: Vampires and Nazis--never mind how they are delineated.

-The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon
Despite what his legion of fans may think, Laymon was not a very good writer. At his best, he is interesting when he's campy and over the top (like in Island or, better yet, The Cellar) but this was just not the right blend of crazy and tasteless. Laymon's value, if he can be said to have any, lies like pornography, in causing you to wonder--and worse, to second guess--if at base, male nature is not, after all, like that.

-Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
The most unsettling thing for me was that the introduction built me up to believe that something great was about to occur and then...it seriously made me wonder if there was something fundamentally wrong with me (the jury is still out on this, of course). To sum up the experience of reading this book: what a child might feel if their parents promise them some great conjurer to appear at their birthday party, only for it to turn out to be a sad clown who can't muster a balloon animal.

[wingsofwax]

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre

-The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon Laymon, despite what his fans may think, was not a good writer but at his best is interesting when campy and over the top (like in Island and, better yet, The Cellar) but this was just not the right blend of these two elements. Laymon's value, if he can be said to have one, lies, like pornography, in making you wonder--and worse second guess--if at base, male nature is not, after all, like that and his schlocky entertainment value.

Good points. I've only read The Cellar, a good read that's refreshingly unpretentious and straight-forward. Yes, it's schlocky and campy as hell, but you know, there's a time and a place for that too. I do think Laymon writes well, if you can handle his stripped-down, no-nonsense prose.

I mentioned The Croning for the exact opposite reasons. It's not bad, but it is pretentious and the prose is stylistically baroque. Characters move around in a speedy haze, dialogue spews forth constantly, but I couldn't shake the feeling that very little was actually happening. I don't want to criticize Barron too much, because I still have hope for his short stories, but The Croning was too flashy for my taste.

Edit: The Croning isn't the worst book I've read, not even close.

[Malachi_Constant]

Quote Originally Posted by wingsofwax

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre -The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon Laymon, despite what his fans may think, was not a good writer but at his best is interesting when campy and over the top (like in Island and, better yet, The Cellar) but this was just not the right blend of these two elements. Laymon's value, if he can be said to have one, lies, like pornography, in making you wonder--and worse second guess--if at base, male nature is not, after all, like that and his schlocky entertainment value. Good points. I've only read The Cellar, a good read that's refreshingly unpretentious and straight-forward. Yes, it's schlocky and campy as hell, but you know, there's a time and a place for that too. I do think Laymon writes well, if you can handle his stripped-down, no-nonsense prose. I mentioned The Croning for the exact opposite reasons. It's not bad, but it is pretentious and the prose is stylistically baroque. Characters move around in a speedy haze, dialogue spews forth constantly, but I couldn't shake the feeling that very little was actually happening. I don't want to criticize Barron too much, because I still have hope for his short stories, but The Croning was too flashy for my taste. Edit: The Croning isn't the worst book I've read, not even close.

I'm one of the biggest Barron fans out there, and I like The Croning. It's better on the second read. I will say though, I think that overall The Croning is his weakest work, especially compared to his excellent short stories and novellas.

[wingsofwax]

Quote Originally Posted by Malachi_Constant

I'm one of the biggest Barron fans out there, and I like The Croning. It's better on the second read. I will say though, I think that overall The Croning is his weakest work, especially compared to his excellent short stories and novellas.

I had a suspicion that that was the case. I hear great things about his short stories, and I will definitely give them a go when I get around to it.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Well, to explain why I disliked The Celestine Prophecy... I should say first off that I saw it as a gag read (in that every year I like to read one or two books that look wildly out of place on my yearly reading lists: previous books I've read that fall into this category include Justin Bieber's First Step 2 Forever and Snooki's Confessions of a Guidette, while last year's gag book was the Kim Kardashian selfies collection Selfish). As you can see, 9 out of 10 times when I do a gag read it's usually some trashy celebrity autobiography, which can be fun to read in and of themselves. I just mention all this because I don't want people thinking that I picked up The Celestine Prophecy expecting to encounter a great work of literature.

But with The Celestine Prophecy I thought it might be amusing to have a trashy New Age book appear on my list. Sadly, the joke was on me, as it was total torture to read. It's barely even a novel: just a parable of some idiot wandering around Peru looking for some lost Mayan sacred book (I believe it was called something really original like "The Manuscript") and searching for the Nine Insights, which are handily given to him by nine strangers he just keeps happening to bump into, so it's a very formulaic read (and it should be said that these "Insights" aren't particularly all that deep or profound). I recall at one point that there was a really patronizing sermon from one character about how important trees are and how horrible it is that so many are cut down... all well and good, but one has to wonder how many trees have sacrificed their lives to provide paper for the 20+ million copies of this book that have been sold since its publication! There were a few action scenes in the book as well, but those scenes were so lazily written and with such a lack of enthusiasm (they were obviously just put in there to make the book seem more like a novel) that the end result is laughable: there's one scene early on where the narrator meets a guy on a plane who is also looking for "The Manuscript" and who gives him one of the Insights. Later on they land at Peru and go their separate ways. A few minutes later the narrator encounters his airplane friend again, now being chased by government officials with guns: this scene was so poorly described I actually burst out laughing when I read it.

[New Devilry]

Quote Originally Posted by Masonwire

Maybe not the worst ever. But last year definitely Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels.

I think this probably was the worst thing I've ever read. Definitely the most disappointing. Hellbound Heart set a high bar, sure, but it felt like Barker didn't even try get close. Scarlet Gospels reads like a really, really, really bad comic book.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was ghost written. It's that bad. He lost a reader.