5 Terrible Books Written by Great Authors
No bibliography by an author is spotless. Philip Roth wrote a dumb book about a horny man turning into a giant breast. Stephen King wrote duds like The Tommyknockers. But there are poor books, and then there are books that make you wonder if there is a flaw in literature in general. Posted On October 28th, 2020
Taming of The Shrew by William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew is a play by Shakespeare within a play. It's a tale told in an alehouse in England by a man, Sly, and his tale is set in Padua, Italy-in a public square, in the house of Baptista, and in the house of Lucentio. Other scenes take place in the country house of Petruchio and on the road between it and the home of Lucentio.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
The Tommyknockers, though, is the only King book that is devoid of all that content. The author himself addressed the cocaine-induced state in which he was writing the sci-fi/thriller of 1987 about a city being overtaken by the psychological transfers and mind manipulations of a UFO. It is written with a perceptible disdain for the rise of technology in the 1980s, a concern that robots and gadgets were progressing faster than people could manage. This is why King felt compelled, one would think, to turn a vacuum cleaner and a Coke machine into villains. A 750-page novel may commit the Tommyknockers also suffers from the worst offence: None of its characters is worth giving a damn about. Perhaps it was the drug-fueled rage of King himself that led him to draw up those cold people and watch them squirt at the hands of invisible power.
The Casual Vacancy by J.K Rowling
After completing her immensely popular Harry Potter book decided to understandably leave the things of the children behind and get down, dirty, and all grown-up. The consequence is The Casual Vacancy, a very dark and ambitious look at how the unexpected death of a widely regarded religious figure stuns a small English village. Rowling's foray into adult literature is completely not for those young people who rooted for Hermione and Ron Weasley to fall in love with each other, marked by scenes of domestic abuse, robbery, drug use, and sex in a cemetery. The Casual Vacancy, unfortunately, is not easily recommended to someone else either. It also reads like a long slog at 500 pages that meanders through explanations of the legislature of the village and the history of duelling class systems.
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse published the novel, Siddhartha, in 1922, which is still revered, 90 years later, as a masterpiece. But Hesse was unable to replicate the feat on his next try, like most writers who write a classic. Five years later, a confounding hodgepodge about a lonely man with a dysfunctional moral compass was published by Steppenwolf. With a nonsensical plot that was difficult to understand because the vocabulary was denser than day-old oatmeal, it was a stylistic about-face from Siddhartha. Steppenwolf was also said by Hesse to be mistaken.
The Chemist by Stephenie Myers
The entire cultural landscape was focused around either being a fan of Twilight or making fun of Twilight back around 2008. Stephenie Meyer sold over 100 million books but was criticised for romanticising a quasi-abusive relationship featuring a heroine with roughly as much agency as a block of Tetris. But in her 2016 novel, The Chemist, the romantic relationship is much, much worse.
