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In search of stocking stuffers, those always thoughtful gifts that cost relatively little but impress their recipients? With everything from easy coffee table reads to more challenging novels, booksellers like Barnes & Noble house all kinds of great gift ideas.
But what if you don't know who their favorite author is? The safest bet is to stick with the publishing world's biggest names, since their reputations precede them. If, say, Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut are such huge deals, surely all of their novels would make worthwhile presents, right?
As any avid reader can tell you, that's most definitely not the case. After all, world-renown authors are still human, and, in turn, prone to the occasional slip-up. Allow your trusty Complex bookworms to make sure those narrative misfires don't end up in any poor sucker's stocking this year with the following list of 19 Bad Books By Good Authors.
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Written by Ross Scarano (@RossScarano), Foster Kamer (@weareyourfek), Matt Barone (@MBarone), Noah Johnson (@noahvjohnson), Jack Erwin (@JackEComplex), and Orlando Lima (@limachips)
The Tommyknockers
Author: Stephen King
Released: 1987
Considering that he's written 50 published novels, it's no small miracle that Stephen King's bibliography is light on flops. Granted, the duds do exist (Rose Madder, for example, could've easily made the cut here), but even in King's weakest efforts, his uncontrollable imagination, delicate characterizations, and knack for at least one knockout scare moment are, to a lesser degree, always present.
The Tommyknockers, however, is the sole King book that's devoid of all those things. The author himself has discussed the cocaine-induced state he was in while writing the 1987 sci-fi/thriller about a town being overtaken by a UFO's psychic transferences and mind manipulations. It's written with a palpable contempt for the rise of technology in the 1980s, a fear that machines and gadgetry were advancing faster than humans could handle.
Which, one would guess, is why King felt compelled to turn a vacuum cleaner and a Coke machine into villains. The Tommyknockers also suffers from the worst offense a 750-page novel can commit: None of its characters are worth giving a damn about. Perhaps it was King's own drug-fueled anger that led him to draft up such cold people and watch them squirm at the hands of an unseen force. —Matt Barone
The Broom of the System
Author David Foster Wallace
Released: 1987
You have a lot of literary history and anxiety about influence to get out from under as a young writer penning a first novel. Because of this, debuts often feel clunky. This feeling becomes even more pronounced in hindsight, after the writer matures into something idiosyncratic and brilliant.
American genius David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, wears his love for the postmodern greats—Thomas Pynchon, especially—like a Boy Scout achievement badge. The threads of the knotty story of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, telephone operator, wind their way around a variety of Wittegenstein-inspired language games. Language is the chief concern, though there’s time for a retirement home uprising and a talking cockatiel. This is maximalism, remember—there’s time for everything.
Wallace never abandoned his everything-all-of-the-time approach, but he did get better with each book, growing as an artist by working to define the purpose of fiction for human beings. Read his essay collections and then tackle Infinite Jest—the world will never seem brighter. —Ross Scarano
Across the River and Into the Trees
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Released: 1950
Forgive us, Papa Hemingway, but even our greatest masters have made a few mistakes. Caravaggio surely has one or two shitty paintings in his oeuvre.
Across the River and Into the Trees isn't just Hemingway's worst book—that might not be so bad. It's just a bad book. The actual story is a 38-chapter-long flashback about a romantic trip to Venice, but in the present action the protagonist, a 50 year-old Colonel, is sitting in a duck blind having a heart attack.
Most people hated the book for it's static plot and overwrought emotion, including many of his closest friends and even his wife, Mary, who said, "I kept my mouth shut. Nobody had appointed me my husband's editor."
Hemingway was bummed, understandably, but two years later, in 1952, he sonned all the critics with The Old Man and the Sea, one of his greatest novels. —Noah Johnson
Vineland
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Released: 1990
Even Pynchon on a slow day, i.e. Vineland, is still worth reading. In other words, don’t let this here blot of text deter you from checking out a superficially goofy novel about a retired hippie and his teenage daughter as they try to escape from an evil federale in Ronnie Reagan’s America.
The central theme—America’s slide into fascism from the perspective of an aging dope smoker—is something Pynchon would take up 19 years later with Inherent Vice. If you have to pick one, choose Vice, where the zaniness is contained within the context of a Chandler-esque piece of private-eye pulp. But since there’s no one like Pynchon, you’ll probably wind up reading them all. —Ross Scarano
The Casual Vacancy
Author: J.K. Rowling
Released: 2012
After completing her massively successful Harry Potter book series, J.K. Rowling understandably wanted to leave the kids' stuff behind and get down, dirty, and all grown-up. The result is The Casual Vacancy, a very dark and ambitious look at how a small English village gets rocked by the sudden death of highly respected religious figure. Marked by scenes of domestic violence, rape, drug use, and sex in a cemetery, Rowling's foray into adult literature is absolutely not for those youngsters who rooted for Hermione and Ron Weasley to fall in love with one another.
Sadly, The Casual Vacancy isn't easily recommendable for anyone else, either. At 500 pages, it often reads like an overlong slog that meanders through descriptions of the village's legislature and history of dueling class systems. Curiously, though, the book also feels too short, namely when it comes to Rowling's inability to derive sympathy for characters who are only fleshed-out to the point of becoming individuals, not anchors for any emotional connections. So when tragedies strike near the book's end, moments of intended impact hit with tickles, not thuds. —Matt Barone
Mockingjay
Author: Suzanne Collins
Released: 2010
Spoilers ahoy, but if you have any interest in reading the final book of The Hunger Games trilogy, be warned: For one thing, it's going to make a far better movie than it ever will a book. For another, the stunning level of violence and smashing of loyal readers' hearts are the antithesis of all the hope Katniss Everdeen—one of the greatest dystopian and YA protagonists ever written—has instilled over the previous two books.
After two stories of people going into The Hunger Games arena, there was no way the characters could go back in, so this book sticks Katniss in two different arenas: First, a claustrophobia-inducing underground bunker where she spends most of her time freaking out and waiting for the revolution and trying to decide between boys. Then, a full-scale ground assault on Panem's Capital City, which flies by so quickly, you barely have time to register the gravity of what's happening (the series' conclusion) let alone the deaths of major characters.
When it's all over, your heart is broken, you're in a state of shock, and you feel like the entire world you've invested two books in has fallen apart (and an epilogue meant to soften the blow doesn't really help). Was it inevitable? Maybe. But did it have to be so brutal, or such a deviation from the other two books? If J.K. Rowling taught anyone anything, the answer is a resounding "No." —Foster Kamer
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Author: Michael Chabon
Released: 2007
The first half of The Yiddish Policeman's Union is fantastic. Chabon imagines an alternate universe where the United States government resettled European Jews in Alaska during World War II (contrary to real history and the U.S. government's callous disregard for European Jewry in the early days of the Holocaust).
The novel hints at other changes to the historic record—JFK escaping assassination and marrying Marilyn Monroe, and the nuclear destruction of Berlin, among others—but the description of Sitka, the imaginary Alaskan city that is the setting for the beginning of the book, is gloriously evocative: detailed, gritty, and, above all, real. Which makes it all the more disappointing when the story leaves Sitka and embarks on a geo-political science fiction joy ride, complete with an American-backed bombing of the Dome of the Rock (by neo-Zionists, in order to inflame anti-Muslim feeling).
It feels cheap to call a book this well written "bad" simply because of its fantastical plot. But there, we said it. —Jack Erwin
Jazz
Author: Toni Morrison
Released: 1992
There are accomplished authors and then there's Toni Morrison. Pulitzer Prize, yes. The Nobel, she has one of those on her mantel too. But her sixth novel, Jazz, was more cacophonous than Miles Davis' electric period.
The book was intended to mimic and explore techniques fundamental to jazz like improvisation and call-and-response, but the result was a mass of words that were harder to follow than a treasure map written in invisible ink. The plot was sloppy and the rich character development she was known for in opuses like Beloved and Song of Solomon was absent.
Prior to Jazz, Morrison had a perfect record of genius, ranging 22 years and five novels. It was the most impressive winning streak any American author has ever put forth. It just goes to show, even the best of us fart loud and smelly once in awhile. —Orlando Lima
Woman
Author: Richard Matheson
Released: 2005
When Woman was published in 2005, Richard Matheson was 79 years old and universally regarded as one of the most important genre writers of all time. Known for classic novels like I Am Legend, Stir of Echoes, and What Dreams May Come, as well as for penning some of The Twilight Zone's best episodes, the New Jersey native is a horror icon. So imagine the excitement that came from hearing Matheson announce that Woman would be his first pure horror book since the 1971 chiller Hell House.
And imagine the overpowering disappointment that longtime Matheson fans felt once they'd finished the novella's 125 pages and realized that their favorite writer had truly lost his old magic. Woman's premise is very promising: One night, while arguing over everything from politics to TV shows, men and women suddenly manifest their resentments in bloody, violent ways against members of the opposite sex. Devoid of any overt supernatural elements, Woman has a gritty, realistic set-up.
But then Matheson spends more than half of the book beating readers' heads in with preachy dialogue that never ends. The experience of completing Matheson's worst effort is akin to sitting in a lecture hall, listening to a bunch of unlikable blowhards debate over feminism and male oppression, and ultimately feeling unsatisfied once they all literally start killing each other. —Matt Barone
The Name of the World
Author: Denis Johnson
Released: 2000
The scariest thing about Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is its singularity. The first time you read the book, it’s like someone ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain (to borrow the novel’s language). You’re changed permanently. And then, because the world is just as cruel as a beating with an extension cord (to borrow one of the novel’s images), you pursue Johnson’s other work and it doesn’t come close. You’re on the other side of your life post-Jesus’ Son, and it is horrible.
The Name of the World lifelessly follows a college professor whose wife and daughter have died in a car accident. His name is Michael Reed and he’s grief-stricken. But then he meets a woman—yes, a story where a young woman will save an older man from a ghastly, boner-less fate, oh boy!—named Flower Canon who demonstrates her vitality by doing things like shaving her pubic hair as part of a performance art piece. She’s got red hair, something that will stand out to Jesus’ Son freaks.
Little details like that, along with the occasional sentence sparking brilliance, only make the reader realize they’re reading the wrong book. Ditch the humdrum and read the sure-shot for the seventh time. —Ross Scarano
Tell-All
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Released: 2010
One of the many joys derived from reading a good Chuck Palahniuk novel (Fight Club, Haunted, Diary) is the awareness that you're in the hands of a fearless experimenter. His stories can induce feelings akin to whiplash or vertigo in readers, with their randomly interspersed factoids, constantly repeated phrases, and moments of nauseating grotesqueness that are played equally for laughs and horror.
Sometimes, unfortunately, free-wheeling artists fly way off the rails, and Tell-All is Palahniuk's least successful attempt to shake up the literary form. In what's essentially a Sunset Boulevard-esque tale of souls thriving and being corrupted in Hollywood, the author goes overboard with his movie trivia inclinations.
The best way to read Tell-All, if you're inclined to do so, is to keep IMDb open on a nearby computer at all times. On every page, there are multiple names of real-life, old Hollywood actors, actresses, and directors all bolded and maddeningly distracting. Rather than power the actual narrative, the novel's endless stream of name-drops is a huge deterrent. It's almost as if Palahniuk is actively trying to get you to put the book down and never look back. —Matt Barone
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Author: Tom Wolfe
Released: 2004
The guy who wrote The Bonfire of The Vanities—introducing the world to the horrid ways of Wall Street at its peak insipidness—took his careful eye to spend over 600 pages on...southern college sorority life? Oh, yes.
Despite extensive research by Wolfe talking to many a college student—or maybe because of it—the unimaginative book comes off like, well, like an old man looking into college life. For example: Despite feminist sympathies, Wolfe wrote one of the most hapless female protagonists ever in the title character, who gives up her virgnity, gets dumped, gets depressed, doesn't do well in her first semester, and so on, but will eventually go on to learn Life Lessons.
Oh, about that ostensibly hot college sex? Wolfe won an award for Bad Sex Scenes in writing for this book. Don't take our word for it: Critics called it "flat-footed," "cheap," "lackadaisical," and "dated." And that was just in the Times review. —Foster Kamer
Steppenwolf
Author: Hermann Hesse
Released: 1927
In 1922, Hermann Hesse published the novel Siddhartha, which, 90 years later, is still revered as a masterpiece. Its theme of self-discovery was written in simple sentences that conveyed many layers of color. But like most authors who publish a classic, Hesse was unable to duplicate that feat on his next try.
Five years later, he published Steppenwolf a confusing hodgepodge about a lonely guy with a dysfunctional spiritual compass. It was a stylistic about-face from Siddhartha with a nonsensical plot that was difficult to understand because the language was more dense than day-old oatmeal.
Hesse often said Steppenwolf was misunderstood. Perhaps that's because much of the plot can be read as happening...or not...a dream...or not.... Even the SNL character Debbie Downer had a more positive outlook on life. Yes, it's that bad. —Orlando Lima
The Seven Days of Cain
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Released: 2010
Unless you're talking about homes adorned with stacks of H.P. Lovecraft books and horror movie DVDs, Ramsey Campbell's name isn't a household one, and that's too bad. Responsible for dozens of excellent scary novels and even more memorable short stories, the Liverpool, England, native is widely revered in the genre community, particularly lovers of horror fiction.
His prose is often hypnotically dreamlike, pulling readers into worlds that resemble reality but very subtly shift into supernatural nightmare-scapes. For the best of Campbell's work, check out The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, and the short story collection Alone with the Horrors.
And steer clear of The Seven Days of Cain. It's not an awful novel by any means—it's just overly familiar for anyone who's well-acquainted with the man's output. Similar to how filmmaker George A. Romero disastrously copied himself with the shitty zombie flick Survival of the Dead, The Seven Days of Cain finds Campbell repeating past plot devices and scare tactics in a story that, atypical to the writer's other books, is quite dull.
It's deeply rooted in the fears surrounding one's discomfort with the Internet, showing how a not-web-savvy guy sinks into overwhelming paranoia once he starts receiving bizarre emails that all connect to a string of recent murders. Ignoring the fact that the book's protagonist still uses dial-up in 2010, The Seven Days of Cain comes off as a lazier, less interesting version of Campbell's earlier, genuinely disturbing novel The Grin of the Dark, which used the World Wide Web to a much creepier effect. —Matt Barone
Glamorama
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Released: 1998
There's nothing worse than waiting years for your favorite artist to drop a new masterpiece, only to be let down by a work that is well below the level you were expecting. We devoured Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers, and the rumors about Glamorama—that it was like all of those books rolled in to one but with super models and a terrorism plot—had us dumb excited.
Ellis is one of our best transgressive writers, a shameless satirist with a deadpan style that makes his work that much more unnerving. He was just 21 when he wrote Less Than Zero, a book that picked apart the wasted youth of Los Angeles' upper crust, and six years later, in 1991, American Psycho came along and changed the way I will forever see chainsaws. But Glamorama adds nothing to the twisted world Ellis created with Patrick Bateman and the cast of characters from his other books, and it fails to say much of anything, really.
From Daniel Mendelsohn's New York Times review:
"American Psycho,'' after all, was a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped novel about a fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed Wall Street sociopath who tortures and dismembers beautiful young women, whereas ''Glamorama,'' as anyone can see, is a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book about an entire gang of fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed sociopaths who torture and dismember both women and men—and lots of them.
Ouch. Turns out Ellis was stumped working on his next great book, Lunar Park—a weird postmodern ghost story featuring the author as the protagonist—and he knocked this dud out in the meantime. His loyalists will tell you that it's a masterful piece of parody, but it's actually boring and tedious and simply not as good as his other books. —Noah Johnson
Hocus Pocus
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Released: 1990
Still lucid in the '90s, as proven by his final efforts of essays later in the decade and in the early aughts before his death (God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, A Man Without A Country, etc.), Kurt Vonnegut's penultimate novel was well-worn ground by this point: Globalization, race, class, the usual.
Yet, this one was a jumbled effort. The subtlety normally present in Vonnegut's books takes a backseat to heavy-handed hammering of points. The most forgettable Vonnegut protagonist, fired college professor Eugene Debs Hartke (and yes, he knows he shares his name with Eugene Debs), spends much of the book counting the number of women he's slept with and people he killed in Vietnam, when he isn't coughing from tuberculosis (which we know as the word "Cough" is interspersed throughout the text). When he goes to teach at a prison, and then, back at the college after it's taken over by prisoners, lessons are ostensibly learned and values imparted.
But for Vonnegut's greatest assault on academia, you'd expect something smarter, or headier; unfortunately, Hocus Pocus was Vonnegut at his angriest and most scathing, which translated to a loss of everything that makes the man's crucial work so special. —Foster Kamer
The Body Artist
Author: Don DeLillo
Released: 2001
There’s something about the short ones, the slim novels (or novellas) where great authors try to do something different and it turns out to be a fart in a tiny space. The Body Artist is Don DeLillo farting.
It sounds like: Lauren Hartke is a performance artist with a problem; her filmmaker husband has thrown the chrome to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Is the problem that she’s sad, or is it the weird guy living in her home like Gary Busey in the under-appreciated made-for-TV crapshow Hider in the House? Who knows? Accept the mystery. Or don’t. —Ross Scarano
The Breast
Author: Philip Roth
Released: 1972
Twenty-seven. Ask Philip Roth how many novels he’s published and he’ll grab his cock, adjust it in his pants, and say, “Twenty-seven, motherfucker,” before going off to look for young tail. At least, that’s how things go in my dreams.
When you’ve written that many novels, of course you’re gonna have duds. The Breast, a blue Metamorphosis where a man turns into a giant breast, is a dud. But give the man some credit—he knows he can only keep this jerk-off session going for so long; the book expires after a mere 78 pages.
Still, sitting through 155-lb. David Kepesh, a man become mammary, obsessing over whether or not he should proposition a woman to fuck him while he’s a breast for that long is asking a lot. It would’ve been better as a tweet. —Ross Scarano
Divisadero
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Released: 2007
Sometimes you can’t appreciate how weak a work is until you’ve absorbed the artist’s entire body of work. If Divisadero were your first Ondaatje, you might be charmed and intrigued by the way he treats time like a word to be rhymed with. He tells all his stories this way, abandoning traditional chronology for something like memory, moments and images associated with the logic of remembering.
When it works, it’s beautiful. We would die for some of the passages from In the Skin of a Lion, or The Cat’s Table. But with this book, concerned with gambling, gypsies, music, and literary biography (farming, too, one must admit), the device feels like a crutch.
He’s still a magician, but you’ve seen him do this trick before, and truth be told, it was better those other times. —Ross Scarano