Worst Books Ever!

I was reading the "Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels" site, and read one of their articles/posts about the worst romance novels of all time. Well, I know which one gets my vote. Thankfully, I have managed to forget the name of the author and the title of the book. But the plot? Argh. I wanted to douse my brain and eyeballs in bleach, scour out the inside of my cranium with a steel-bristled brush, and complete the job by clawing out my eyeballs.

What made it so bad? That'll require a bit of explanation. The story is about a man and his niece. The niece is in her late teens/early 20's, and has finally met the man she wants to marry. The uncle is convinced that the man is bad for her... only wants her for her money, is a general cad, and so on. He tries (not very hard, IMO) to convince her of this, but she is in LOVE, and won't be convinced.

So, the uncle waits until the morning of her wedding, kidnaps her out of her house, drags her down to his boat in the harbor and sets sail to Italy while her fiancee is waiting at the altar. And then, to ensure she can't somehow get away from him and go running back to the man she loves, her uncle proceeds to rape her so that she knows she is "damaged goods" and won't force her fiancee to marry her. And this isn't the usual "seduction rape", where the heroine starts to enjoy herself because she is somewhat attracted to the man who's forcing her (although that's just as bad in my opinion). This is screaming, crying, doesn't feel anything but pain rape. You know, RAPE with all capital letters.

What really kills me about this book, is that the heroine eventually ends up falling for her uncle, and forgives him for what he did to her. Me, I wanted to cut the SOB's balls off with a rusty saw, and then some. Why did I keep reading? I wanted to see the Uncle get his comeuppance. Does he? Never, which is why the book made me so angry.

The heroine gets so depressed by this whole thing and the idea that she is now "damaged goods" that she stops eating and nearly dies. The uncle, while struggling to get her to take nourishment and forcing her to live, gets the idea that what he did was wrong. No! Really?! Ya think?! And then he treats her better and she gets attracted to him, falls in love with him (I think it was the Stockholm Syndrome, myself) and ends up marrying him. And her fiancee? Yeah, he turns out to be exactly the kind of asshat her uncle warned her he was to begin with. So, in addition to abusing the hell out of heroine, he gets the satisfaction of being right, too. Oh, it's enough to make me want to puke blood.

Worst Sci-Fi book? For this one I will have to go with an entire series, the "Hope" Series by David Feintuch. The hero starts out as a young man who has been abused, for seemingly his entire life, both mentally, emotionally and physically, by his own father. The father beat into his son's head that he is some horrible, nasty, abusive person who barely deserves to live. Nicholas Seafort constantly puts his own actions in the worst possible light. For instance, after he joins the space navy, he meets a young woman who is attracted to him. when they kiss and canoodle a little, he remembers it as him forcing himself on her, making himself out to be a sexual abuser. And when a man under his command breaks some of the navy rules and Nicholas is forced (by the navy's own regs, mind you!) to whip him before the space navy version of the quartermast, in his mind he is this horrible, abusive figure who is barely this side of Captain Bligh.

Now, I could understand if, eventually, Nicholas Seafort learns that he is actually a decent man and manages to put his father's abuse behind him. For despite his horrible self-image, he is a very heroic figure who manages to save ships, people and planets despite incredible odds. But he never manages to do so. Never. Or at least, not in the three books I read completely and in the two I looked at the end to see if he'd somehow managed to overcome it this time. Nope, didn't happen. And while there are seven books in the series, I could barely stomach the first three. The first one wasn't bad- I expected that at some point in the story Nicholas Seafort might manage to do something and overcome his own self-image. But he didn't in the first book, and that, frankly, left something of a bad taste in my mouth. I read the next two hoping against hope that the change would happen there. But it didn't.

Honestly, there is only so much self-loathing I can stomach in a character before I must stop reading. Reading the "Hope" series didn't give me any. Hope, that is. It got to the point where I was seriously saying to myself, "Must find a gun to put myself out of Nicholas' misery." So, the next two, I looked at in the bookstore, scanned the ending pages for some sign that Nicholas was pulling out of his "I'm a horrible person who doesn't deserve to live!" funk. If he'd managed it, I might actually have read the rest of the series, but sadly, Nicholas didn't learn anything, except maybe how to like himself *less*.

At that point, I just stopped reading. I couldn't read any more, and gave the rest of the series a pass. It may be great writing, but to me, they were the worst Sci-Fi books I ever read. You couldn't *pay* me to read them again.

Worst "Men's Adventure"- Hands down, "The Crime Minister" by Ian Barclay. What can you say about a book that includes the line "Her center of gravity was her twat."? Bad writing, Bad plot and a character who shoots and screws his way through the world. Reminds me of a line from a filk about the Dorsai. "We'll steal or we'll screw what we can't shoot on sight. God, it's hell to encounter a fireplug."

More to come!