Something Awful

I think I’d like to start a series of reviews wherein I revisit old books I can vaguely remember being terrible.

Honestly, I’ve read so much in my life (although admittedly less recently) that I think I’d have an interesting time of it. There are plenty of fantastic books I’d love to recommend, but there are also plenty of trainwreck pages covered in the utter gore of someone’s disorganized thoughts that I would love to talk about at length. You know, like a kind of morbid impulse to point out a car crash to someone else.

I have a few ideas of where I’d like to start. By nature of my age and consumption peaking during YA’s chaotic rise to power, I’d likely revisit plenty of terrible vampire stories and other less-popular gems of the horror type. I don’t necessarily want to preach endlessly about how terrible those books are for young people (and girls especially) in retrospect. I think we’re all aware that the Unnamed Vampire Book is terrible not just for its unsexy and emotionally manipulative relationships, but for its gross misrepresentation of an entire nation of people who then had to come out and say, ‘Hey, guys, can you maybe not commercialize a weird pastiche of our actual culture?’

Anyways. Bad books.

I think the fun in bad books is similar to bad movies: if approached through a healthy adult lens, you can get some catharsis out of watching plot holes widen to chasms and bad character decisions culminate in clownishly stupendous drama. Everyone needs to yell at the screen every once in a while, right? Well, I’m suggesting it can be just as fun to toss a book across the room and mutter into your red beverage of choice.

So: get started, me. It’s time for a grand old romp into the terrible book catalog I’ve been sitting on for a decade. I didn’t read all those pages for nothing!