strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 27 05: the eye of arrrrrgh
Hoo boy. One upon a time there was a vanity press that insisted it was a Traditional Publisher, despite the fact that it behaved like nothing of the sort and seemed to exist only to suck the cash out of people desperate to have their bad novels see the light of day.
This vanity press became notorious among people who write for a living, not just for the generally abysmal quality of the work it published but for the way it wrung money out of people who really didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, no matter how deluded they were. The vanity press insisted it did nothing wrong, that it picked promising works from the inbox and helped them achieve the greatness for which they were destined. For a reasonable fee, of course. For several quite reasonable fees. So shut up, you, or we’ll sue. You’re just jealous and/or elitist, anyway.
The cranky observers wondered: was it even possible to have your book rejected by this vanity press? How bad did a novel have to be before this vanity press started to make decisions that resembled those of a Traditional Publisher?
So a bunch of authors hatched a plot to write the worst book ever in human history, as a collective project, and send it out. Thus was born Atlanta Nights, by Travis Tea. Here’s the message board that has the report on what happened. Here’s where you can buy the book, and also read some very funny reviews thereof. Here’s the book’s entire text if you want to read it online (in rich-text format). In the words of one reviewer, it’s the literary version of Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. It’s truly breathtaking. It’s bad in all the ways a book can be bad, plus a few more ways that had hitherto applied only to war criminals.
I must have a copy. It’s so bad it hurts. Your brain tells you to stop reading, but you can’t take your eyes off it. (It’s also rather smutty, so the full text should be labeled as Not Safe For Work.)
Thank you to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for spreading the word on this one.