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So Bad It's Horrible/Literature: Difference between revisions

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* Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing have published over 300,000 books. Sounds pretty interesting, until you realize that all of them are just a bunch of Wikipedia articles. "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA Articles!", the cover of each book states. It gets worse:
** The title of each book is always misleading. You'd expect a book titled "Giving Circles" to be all about, y'know, giving circles (volunteers who come together to financially support a cause). So why, then, does the book have a Wikipedia article on the United Kingdom in it? While the Wikipedia article on "Giving Circles" ''is'' in the book, it only takes up one page of the 108-page book.
** The covers [http://brianbusby.blogspot.com/2011/10/alpha-beta-dada.html are] [[Epic Fail|epic failures]], such as the book on the Fieseler Fi 167 showing a [[Critical Research Failure|C-130]], and another on the 1867 Canadian Election showing '''the United States flag'''.
** The editors don't check the articles to make sure they're accurate, which means that vandalism could've ended up in the books.
** The books are often only 40-50 pages long, 100 at the absolute most, yet cost up to $100USD. For Wikipedia articles that you can access and read on the internet ''for free'' ([[Banned in China|unless you live in China]]).
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** The author's way of advertising this book is just as horrible. He spams every single article about said politician and whenever he finds positive comments, he links to this book in an attempt to "convert" the politician's supporters. Unsurprisingly, most of these comments were flagged for spam.
* ''The Blah Story'' by Nigel Tomm is the second-longest novel at 11,300,000 words<ref>The longest book is ''Marienbad My Love'' by Mark Leach, at 17,000,000 words.</ref>, containing both the longest sentence and the longest coined word in English. This ''might'' have been [[So Bad It's Good]], except the book itself is boring as blah; it's written something 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..."
** A little tidbit that's sure to frighten: Robert Jordan's ''[[Wheel of Time]]'' series has a total of 4,012,859 words, spread across ''fifteen'' books, each qualifying for [[Doorstopper]] status. ''The Blah Story'' is nearly '''three times that length''' condensed into a single book.
* ''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 bat-like vampire monsters known as Chiropterans. Given that the film involved a lot of blood, monster-hunting, and gory action, you'd think ''Night of the Beast'' 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 stars a generic male student who travels place to place, 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. 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.
* Books LLC's ''Wikipedia Source'' series might be an even worse example of published Wikipedia articles than the aforementioned Alphascript and Betascript Publishing. In addition to possesing all of Alphascript and Betascript's flaws, Books LLC's titles seems to have been randomly generated by an automated algorithm, leading to verbal diarrhea such as "[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gremlin-Interactive-Games-Allegiance-Harlequin/dp/1234596768 Gremlin Interactive Games: Loaded, Fragile Allegiance, Jungle Strike, Top Gear 3000, Harlequin, Body Harvest, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation]{{Dead link}}", with equally incoherent descriptions. The presentation also has the barest minimum effort put into it, with most of the covers looking like [http://www.biblio-moto-books.net/images/motorcycle_manufacturers_of_italy.jpg this].
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* As ''Crossroads of Twilight'' is to ''[[Wheel of Time]]'', ''Naked Empire'' represents the bottom-of-the-barrel for Terry Goodkind's ''[[Sword of Truth]]'' series. This book, moreso than the others before it, is mostly a [[Author Tract|sermon against communism and pacifism]], containing the infamous "[[Strawman Political|evil-pacifist]]" plot of Bandakar. Even outside the conflict, Richard's dialogue is constantly saturated with Goodkind's views when he's talking to his friends. (At one point, he and his half-sister discuss the "right" of hair to live on a person's head. ''It's that bad.'') The main plot of the series is advanced barely an inch by the end of this book, there are [[Character Filibuster|speeches]] that go on for pages or even ''whole chapters'', the plot's resolved in one of the most blatant [[Deus Ex Machina]]s in literature, and...ah, screw it — go look at the reviews on [http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Empire-Sword-Truth-Book/product-reviews/0765344300/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 Amazon.com] if you want more proof.
* While [[Vanity Publishing]] has long been known to be a haven for the worst attempts at semi-literate [[Purple Prose]], ''Night Travels of the Elven Vampire'' by LaVerne Ross is painfully bad even by that standard. But it does provide [[Snark Bait|excellent fodder]] for [http://crevette.livejournal.com/113659.html a truly hilarious review.]
* ''Noir'' by K.W. Jeter is a [[Doorstopper]] [[Cliché Storm|set in a]] [[Dystopia]]n [[Cyberpunk]] [[Crapsack World]]. As the title implies, Jeter attempts to write the whole novel in the style of the narration of a [[Film Noir]] (justified [[In-Universe]] because the main character has had ocular implants that redraw the world as a black-and-white noir film for him). Unfortunately, it reads like a novel-length [[It Was a Dark and Stormy Night|Bulwer-Lytton contest entry]]. Once you've gotten about 200 pages in and already committed too much of your time, you discover that the main character's nothing more than a [[Marty Stu]] "Copyright Cop" who spends the rest of the book [[Author Filibuster|discussing how people who infringe copyrights]] should be ''[[Disproportionate Retribution|dismembered and tortured]]'' because, in the Information Age setting of the book, [[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?|copyright theft is worse]] than virtually ''all'' other crimes. The book's nothing more than a '''very long''' [[Author Tract]] — Jeter's website indicates that he believes in his message. Adding insult to injury, there's a few interesting concepts [[They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot|that are almost entirely discarded]] [[Plot Tumor|in favor of copyright ranting]].
* ''No Touching'' by Aileen Deng. Let's put it this way — the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, [[Old Shame|who were responsible for its very commissioning, would kindly like you to forget it ever existed]]. Allegedly commissioned to dispel the most common myths about [[Asexuality]], the main character instead reads as [[Stop Being Stereotypical|a compilation of the worst of these myths]], and the plot doesn't even help matters. The only way to express its badness would be Elizabeth the Gray's review [http://www.amazon.com/No-Touching-Aileen-Deng/dp/1449900313 here.]
** Note that the book has a 2-star average on Amazon. For a long time it had a 3.5 one: Elizabeth and two other people gave it one star each, and two people who ''haven't reviewed ''anything else on the site'' gave it four and five stars, and the review left by the 4-star one passive-aggressively addressed the points in Elizabeth's review. Suspicious...
* ''Org's Odyssey'' by Duke Otterland. The whole plot 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 [[One Sided Battle|7 to 1]]. See the reviews [http://www.amazon.com/Orgs-Odyssey-Tale-Post-human-Earth/dp/0595316794 here.]
** More recently, it's become the replacement read for ''The Eye of Argon'' at [[Anthro Con]], which started the two-hour session with four readers and ended with over 30. It's figured there's enough fresh material for almost a decade.
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