Absolutely Ridiculous Things in Books

[SmidgenofaPigeon]

I’m reading (it’s painful and I will use it for kindling when I’m finished) Just My Luck by Adele Parks. I actually used to enjoy her books back in the day for a bit of mindless escapism and the characters were well-written but they’ve slid into lunacy over the last few years. Think twins pretending to be the same person and getting married to one guy (or something like that) and a mum’s glamorous 45 year old mate shagging her 17 year old son and getting pregnant while they all live under the same roof.

The latest one they win the lottery and calamity ensues in the most implausible ways possible.

The daughter in this one is musing over the fact that her boyfriend has turned into a bit of cad and she’s moping about, and musing over missing ‘the musty smell of his balls’

THE MUSTY SMELL OF HIS BALLS.

The character in question is FIFTEEN. She was ONLY FIFTEEN YEARS OLD (in the voice of Micheal Caine)

Please add, there must be loads, and we can have a laugh on this horrible wet January afternoon.

I read the Jack Reacher books to my husband. They're contrived at the best of time and SO badly written.
Oh, god, they’re my weakness, though. My absolute favourite was reading two back to back and in one, his fists were described as “the size of roast chickens”. In the next one: “he put his fists on the table. The size of frozen turkeys”. They’d grown! What implausible poultry will come next?!

Most ridiculous book I’ve read is Follow You Home by Mark Edwards couple backpacking through Romania train breaks down (I think they are drugged at some point) they walk through some dark woods and the find an abandoned house well it gets worse

Utter nonsense

And in The Undoing. Grace is told by a few people that Elena needs to talk to her. She doesn’t get round to this. Next day she finds out Elena was brutally murdered and a few days after realises her husband is involved. But never does she give it any thought what did Elena want to say to me wtf no wonder they changed the book so much for the series

Thank you hyggetygge I knew I had pinched it from somewhere. I’m not really that witty on my own!

I actually love the Sophie Kinsella book where the heroine has a panic attack on a plane and tells the geezer sitting next to her all her embarrassing secrets, then he turns out to be her boss. So I do like some preposterous storylines.

Grace is told by a few people that Elena needs to talk to her. She doesn’t get round to this.

I'm so tired of this device. Someone tells you they 'need to talk to you'. Unless you were in the middle of a life and death emergency, you'd ask them to spit it out. Not brush them off because you needed to get to the supermarket or whatever (and next day, they've been murdered or vanished or something, naturally)

@OhWhyNot
Re The Undoing - not read the book but SO disappointed in the ending of the TV series . So the twist was that there was no twist

@burritofan

I read the Jack Reacher books to my husband. They're contrived at the best of time and SO badly written. Oh, god, they’re my weakness, though. My absolute favourite was reading two back to back and in one, his fists were described as “the size of roast chickens”. In the next one: “he put his fists on the table. The size of frozen turkeys”. They’d grown! What implausible poultry will come next?!

Brilliant His fists were the size of a giant albatross? Or an emu?

Read a novel by Prue Leith when dd was a baby. A character in her book was a single mother so simply went back to work and popped the baby under her desk. The mind boggles! As dd was the same age as this under the desk baby I knew how unworkable it was!

@OhWhyNot I read "follow you home" as well. I can't remember what happened, can you remind me as I know I don't want to read it again. I remember it being pretty rubbish and was there a crummy twist at the end?

@littlemisslozza

Has anyone read Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough? I actually really enjoyed it until the most unbelievable and ridiculous twist at the end to do with body swapping. I can't even begin to explain!

I thought it was sort of refreshing, in a strange way. It seemed to be shaping up as yet another "aren't women all a load of evil bitches" thing, and then suddenly it went off in an unexpected direction. I almost respected the fact that the author committed to the supernatural explanation - usually, it turns out to be down to the flaky heroine's split personality or a gaslighting ex playing tricks on her.

@iklboo

Graham Masterton wrote some ok books. And some shonky ones. The Manitou (or the Manitou Returns) being memorable for the possessed bloke ramming his hand down a woman's throat, grasping her vulva and pulling her inside out. Which is some feat of anatomy.

I must’ve read that when very young 🤦🏻‍♀️ Wtf!

Tbf if the narrative carries me on I don’t always notice the complete lack of realism until later.

Maybe that’s the thing with horror fiction- if you can suspend your disbelief due to the flow of the writing, how far can it be pushed before you are thrown out of the story and back into reality?

Oh god I sound like my GCSE English class.

Either more or less 🤦🏻‍♀️

@JimmyJabs yes, that's true! It was certainly memorable.

I used to love the Jack Reacher books even though they had stupidly short sentences.
Then I read one in which a woman was kidnapped(?) and in the front seat of the car and Ole Ham Fists in the back.
It went on for pages and pages something about her blinking and him counting them and they were communicating in some bloody way. I threw the book across the room and haven't read any since.
My Mum refused to read Peter James when Cleo entered into them. She hated the way they called each other 'Darling' all the time, because "that's unnatural".
And don't get me started on Normal People.

I believe lots of publishing houses refuse fewer than 80000 words now,

I work in publishing and can categorically say this is bollocks. At least it is in ours. There’s a rough word count on the contract usually, but nobody actually checks or tries to stick to it.
My experience of serial authors isn’t that extensive as ours isn’t really that type of book (though one of ours has been mentioned which made me smirk as the complaint was exactly what we all thought too, except the boss!) but it’s a mixture of the author becoming so famous they think nobody else knows anything and refusing to engage with edits, the editor getting higher up the tree as a result of their famous author and becoming insanely busy and starting to palm most of their work off on some very young and undertrained assistant without bothering to check their work, and the famous author also deciding they don’t have to adhere to any deadlines and delivering some insanely bloated first draft about three months before the printing deadline and causing everyone involved to have to do any work to it at top speed and without time to rewrite any of it. We do have editors, copy-editors and proofreaders, but if everything has to be rushed then mistakes do get missed.

When he's not here , Carrie Milligan ( sp?)
Made me so ragey
Really picky well researched in some ways but then others just ah ...
She gives random pills to her vet friend who tests them in her lab
Pops anxiety pills when she feels anxious and they work straight away
And , spoiler alert, turns out her husband wasn't bipolar, he really was twins 🤣🤣🤣

I've just started reading a nick spalding book called 'going green' but a couple of chapters in the female lead has got herself into a sticky situation because she couldn't use the words 'there's been some mistake' (or similar) instead she has to go through some implausible embarrassing situation. I don't know what it is as I gave up.

@MaryLennoxsScowl that’s really interesting- and I’m dying to know what the book is that has been mentioned that you and your colleagues had the same thoughts on!

The Manitou (or the Manitou Returns) being memorable for the possessed bloke ramming his hand down a woman's throat, grasping her vulva and pulling her inside out. Which is some feat of anatomy.
Delightful. Something similar happens in the ridiculous killer clothes novel. This anorak shoves its sleeve inside this poor bewildered woman's vagina and pulls her womb out. Nice.
At this point in the novel I really wondered where I had gone wrong in life.

I read one years ago, can't remember title or author

Hero was a big name American Footballer, descended from small-time English aristos.

Heroine is granddaughter of recently-deceased small-time English aristo whose estate goes to his distant American cousin, leaving her homeless and penniless.

So far, so perfectly reasonable set-up. Brace yourselves. (I should probably stress that this was set in the latter part of the twentieth century.)

The "map" at the front of the book was a sketchy outline of Britain, titled England, with a blob at the bottom labelled Guildford.

Guildford, when our hero arrives in it, is a picturesque village with a duck-pond on the central green.

Heroine has no discernible skills or friends, because her grandfather, who grudged every penny she cost him, refused to send her to school, relying on the staff to teach her (there may actually have been a dedicated governess at one point).

After hero has persuaded her to marry him (because a small, possibly loaned, allowance while she gets some training would be far too simple) she gets really into watching American Football - which, ok, fair enough; but the sentence that introduces us to this concept is her asking him "what is football?"

(I did finish the book Spoiler: she turns out to be quite good at analysis of the game and I think the inference was she might get a presenter's post. Who'da thunk it? Oh, and they fall in love.)

I do love (most) Reacher books but I agree the blinking one was a low point! He’s not aged into the modern world very well, and the last few books were poor. I still read them though - those and Sidney Sheldon are my guilty pleasures!

shinynewapple2021 no there a twist just the thoughts of a self absorbed smug women who it’s difficult to feel sympathy for.

ChocOrange1
I seem to remember that they find someone who was being slowly tortured tied to a bed they escape (Not before having to hide and I think maybe killing someone) and are chased through the woods somehow they finally get home but feel someone is always following them (I think). I’m surprised Dracula didn’t make an appearance

Robert A Heinlein is a treasure trove.

Quite apart from Farnham's Freehold, in which a character who thinks she's one of the last few humans left alive ponders "which is worse: incest or miscegenation?" and expects to be taken seriously

There's a bit (Number of the Beast) where Hilda is musing about the eschewing of underwear and concludes that it must be more uncomfortable for men "because men's is air-conditioned"

Another common fault in publishing is paying less than the going rate for freelancers, so the good people become very sought-after and protect their rates, but every literature grad thinks they can proofread and the publisher can’t get a decent freelancer because they don’t pay properly so have to use the people with no idea what they’re doing.

Mark Edwards used to write some corkers, always popping up on my free kindle offers. One was a serial about a sociopath called Lucy who was able to break out of prison and torture a former victim with spiders. I don’t know where she was getting all of these spiders, but she’d get out of prison and somehow obtain a load of spiders 🤷🏻‍♀️