Tag Archives: random house

Doomed

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doomedby Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday (Random House) 2013

First sentence: Good and evil have always existed.
First too-snarky sentence: I’m a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker.
Another too-snarky sentence: I would not be stuck here on the stony Galapagos that is Earth, drinking the warm tortoise urine that is human companionship, were it not for the Halloween caper cutting of a certain three Miss Slutty O’Slutnicks.
Still more snark: …on All Hallow’s Eve the entire population of Hades returns to Earth to forage for salted nut clusters and Raisinettes from dusk until midnight.
But the worst is still to come: To you predead people, like it or not, postalive people are not your bitches.
Number of pterodactyls I saw while reading the first three pages: 4 (perhaps 3, might have seen the same one twice)
Benzodiazepines I took in order to finish three pages: Ativan, Serax, plus some Benadryl for my shitty book allergies
Side effects of these medications may include: pterodactyl sightings

Other reviews: iamjanesheart, 3 guys 1 book, Life in 64 Square Feet, Bookhounds

That’s come, right? On the cover? That was intentional, right? A bukkake scene on the cover of one of Random House’s most respected imprints? Somebody spoke up, right? RIGHT? Well, if it was intentional, consider me…not that shocked really.

I loved Fight Club. I’ve read it and reread it. I have disliked everything else Chuck Palahniuk has published. He usually manages to catch my attention early on, but it never lasts and there is a wake of barely-read Palahniuks trailing behind me. Is he, therefore, a shitty author?

One thing shitty book authors do frequently is take an otherwise uninteresting scene, in this case a Lincoln Town Car (Ford must be paying authors to mention them) leaving a gated estate in the hills above Los Angeles, and transform it into epic, supreme holy business, in this case the fulfillment of a prophecy sung by ancient Egyptian oracles. It is too hard to write two or three sentences describing a car driving, and all the ugly shit that comes along behind it in simple terms, including lights being extinguished and rats being crushed. The author wants you to believe it’s important. It isn’t. It’s a prologue.

Shitty authors also like using odd devices they think clever to unfurl the narrative. In this case, each chapter is a timestamped “post” to an unnamed “web log” by the main character Madison Spencer, from her email address on the afterlife.hell server. It was in this way Chuck Palahniuk tricked me into reading that prologue, which I usually try to skip because it’s always shitty and useless and this one was no different. It’s no wonder, then, that I felt sick to my stomach after reading this flash-fiction-pulp-fiction irrelevant piece of shit that is the prologue, like eating a piece of cake dragged across some smelly dicks.

So then I read the first three pages of the real book and it it actually got worse. Madison Spencer is a ghost. A snarky ghost. A fat snarky ghost. Who escaped Hell. It feels like bad science fiction. It feels like tongue-in-cheek chick-lit. It feels like young adult fiction. It feels amateurish.

This is a blog about shitty books, not about shitty authors. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a great book that was important to me when I was 19, but he can’t write anything anymore that isn’t shitty. This book is shitty. And I think I’m ready to call Chuck Palahniuk a competent but shitty author who had two or three really good ideas once, and put them all into one book. Now he goes for shock value but he leaves us with nothing shocking or valuable.

And also, “Palahniuk” is extraordinarily difficult to type on a Dvorak keyboard. I don’t know why. Just thought it was interesting.

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)

The Human Blend

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by Alan Dean Foster
2010 Del Rey (Random House)

First: “Let’s riffle the dead man.” Jiminy scowled at the newly won corpse and hopped to it.
Techo neologisms on the first page: Meld, mudbud, barker, fib, flexstent
Method of selection: Look at the cover. This has to be shitty. 

Call me crazy, but this book is not shitty. I expected it to be because it appears to be cheesy sci-fi. Only now have I learned that Alan Dean Foster wrote a lot of the original Star Wars, plus The Empire Strikes Back, and the first Star Trek movie. This guy has stratospheric nerd points, and from what I can tell, he knows how to write pretty well.

Foster drops us into a scene where two futuristic thugs have killed a man and are raiding his body for artificial parts, because in the future many people, called melds, have been modified in extreme ways, some as a form of criminal punishment. But rather than present a clichéd story about normal people versus androids, the thugs themselves are also melds, one whose legs have been modified for jumping and the other who has been modified to be unusually thin. And to my surprise it’s believable and invites some critical thinking about medical ethics. I was actually interested in where the story was going, and the technical descriptions were fun instead of cumbersome. For extra fun, the setting is a post-global warming Savannah, Georgia, which is loveably specific. Even the plot synopsis on the front leaf is compelling.

Other reviews: Functional Nerds, Owlcat Mountain, Bitchy Reader, The Merry Genre Go Round Reviews

(Support this site by purchasing this not shitty book through one of the links below.)