[…] it’s almost as if there’s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn’t much worse than Stephenie Meyer’s, which is middlin’ horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, not to mention largely incoherent and ethically vacuous.
Or there’s Dan Brown, who wouldn’t recognise a grammatical sentence or a plausible sequence of events if they each wrestled him to the ground and sat on his head. Which I dearly wish they would, if only to keep him away from any keyboard whatsoever and preserve a forest or two from dying all in vain.
By any criterion other than sales each of these bestsellers is plainly a badly inferior example of its genre and of the writer’s craft, yet they explode while far better things that are no less available (though often less advertised) do modestly. Some of it is a bit like talentless boy bands, an almost purely commercial phenomenon, but one still has to wonder why those particular publishers’ pushes go so viral. And weep.
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU) (Goodreads blog), posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), 2013-10-22
October 23, 2013
QotD: Popular fiction
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