Ultimately this review site is a place for me to read really bad books as everyone around me cries and begs for me to read something good. I mean I dip around to other places, but we all know I crave the embrace of something bad. The thing is, bad comes in several levels. Some books are so bad they’re a bore, and some are hilariously weird and stupid that you have to love them.
Or, love to hate them.
wip
Tridea’s Children, Kevin Peake
Headache level: Unending
Genre: Fantasy adventure
Key features: Absolutely no editing meets absolutely no technical writing skill. Blatant rips from favourite anime and video games. There is no competence to be found. This is a wild, earnest bad book found organically.
A former classmate of mine wrote this and it’s the worst thing I’ve read. It physically hurts to try and get through the nonsensical world, plot, and writing, but it’s also so insanely bad it’s pretty entertaining to discuss.
Hades, Alexandra Adornetto
Headache level: Minimal
Genre: Supernatural romance YA (christian)
Key features: BIG DADDY. The Door Bitches. The bad boy love interest takes bad boy a step too far by being a confirmed former nazi.
This is book two but while book three is also pretty fun and stupid, book one is very boring. Just skip it. The main character is an angel who accidentally takes a motorcycle trip into Hell and everything that happens is just insane and very very funny.
Evermore, Alyson Noel
Headache level: Nuclear
Genre: Supernatural Romance YA
Key features: Contains every trope from this era of para-ro, except it was published before a lot of the heavy hitters. Alchemy giving eternal life, but also trans-dimensional reality shaping abilities. The power of love turning the mean jealous girl to ash. A comic relief ghost eleven year old.
This book feels like a parody I once wrote of the genre it belongs in, but it’s a better and funnier parody than I could ever write. However, because it’s serious, it is still really exhausting. It’s your standard mysterious paranormal boy comes to school tale, but the paranormal aspect is just every thing at once and yet nothing at all. This series has like six books at least.
Song of the Night, Zoe Burgess
Headache level: 5d10 psychic damage
Genre: Supernatural Roman- I mean BxB DONT LIKE DONT READ XD XD YAOI LEMON
Key features: Offensive ideas of gender from an author with a gender studies degree. Four women who follow the exact same arc of going crazy and then dying. Licking sweat out of bellybuttons erotically. The question to the mystery of who would win in a fight to the death: one gay vampire or the entire population of London?
Poor, repetitive writing meets a book that turns the idea of a gay romance into exclusively that of Yaoi, aka the very exploitative, weird genre of anime/manga that is famously full of bad tropes and reductive gender roles. Come for the creepy adult vampire X cross-dressing ‘boy’ romance, stay for the insane magic powers and nonsensical climax. The book changes from first to third person midway through.
Sweet Evil, Wendy Higgins
Headache level: Surprisingly light
Genre: Supernatural romance YA (christian)
Key features: The love interest’s dad steals the main character’s underwear so he can smell it to see if she’s still a virgin. The main character’s dead angel mom showing up to applaud her immediately after she first has sex. The main character’s virginity getting one of her friends pretty directly killed. The love interest’s unresolved participation with sex trafficking of children from Eastern European countries, which is introduced in book one and ‘solved’ years later in the epilogue. Yes, he continues to partake in this for a solid two books.
This series might be the most overall unhinged para-ro YA angel 2010s book I’ve dealt with. I’m starting with book one, and honestly they’re all pretty resoundingly weird. There’s so many things just to discuss or talk about that I’d suggest looking at my reviews. It’s such a bizarre trilogy that has so many extremely offensive elements and yet was a pretty good success somehow.
Immortal City, Scott Speer
Headache level: Mid-tier
Genre: Celebrity romance, but they’re angels YA
Key features: The alternate history timeline doesn’t add up and is worth starting a mini podcast series over where you just try to consider how the world would have changed if during the American Civil War, real angels just descended, stopped it, and became immortal celebrities soon corrupted by capitalism. Bonus feature: beyond the main character and the love interest, the third viewpoint is a harried down on his luck cop just trying to solve one last case linked to his haunted past, and yes, it really is a weird tonal shift.
Angels came down from heaven because the American Civil War made them sad, but now they are immortal paragons who live in LA and save people’s lives with their magic wings on a money-based subscription service. A normal girl and a young angel fall in love, et cetera, but also there’s a murderer out. The plot is really quite boring, you only want to stay for the breadcrumbs of bizarro world building.
Headache level: faith in the publishing industry inducing
Genre: YA fantasy, tash fire
Key features: Don’t buy this book. Only find it.
The most horrendously poorly thought out worldbuilding meets beyond amateur writing in this extremely poorly done book that nonetheless has given the very rich privilege baby author a six figure deal. Jesus, it consumes you. There’s non-stop something to talk about, laugh at, or become angry at. It took a week of dedicated reading… because almost every paragraph was some ridiculous detail I had to discuss for thirty minutes with my friends. There’s a reason the review I did is of cinematic length.
Reaper’s Creek, Onision
Headache level: Disrespectful pummelling
Genre: Wish fulfilment hero fantasy creepshow
Key features: Edgy atheism so extreme the main character effortlessly kills god. Daddy issues and mommy issues. Reprogramming humanity to make the world a better place :). VaginaDentata.
A boy gets implanted with a magic stone by aliens and gets more and more powerful until he can rewrite reality and kill god, and it is played entirely straight with no introspection. Rarely do you feel like you learn the author’s entire life story when reading a work of fiction, and yet. Contains warnings for creepy sex stuff (of course it does).
Headache level: Rereading every page three times really gives you one
Genre: Fantasy LGBT+ romance
Key features: A severe lack of understanding about what writing is. Edge, edge, edge! Unclear time periods. Angel tangents. Romance…?
An extremely exclusive and hard to find “book” (it is a short story of about 30 pages, but does fill in about as much plot as a novel). A vampire and a demon fall in love (citation needed), and little does the vampire know, they were once in love hundreds of years ago. Set in a fantasy modern times slash entirely unclear with no editing or formatting, where the most detail in the book is in fact the several page long torture scene. Very funny.
Crow Defeats Books 