A request for shots to be fired in this week’s reader question from u/overwhelmingbatch1268:

What’s the worst fantasy novel you ever read?

I really would like to answer this question in a straightforward way. This feature comes with an explicit contract: you folks can ask me anything, and I will do my best to give a complete and honest answer without punting or dissembling. That said, I really hesitate to opine publicly in a negative way about the work of other writers. The internet is full of forums where anyone can openly defecate on creative works, but I don’t think it’s spiritually a good choice for me to join in.

With that preamble, I do think good-faith critique can be part of a healthy book culture, so I’m slightly less hesitant to discuss other people’s writing through the lens of literary criticism. In the past, I’ve held up published works as both good and bad examples of craft, and I don’t think I’ve incurred any Karmic debt by doing so.

I can’t possibly put my finger on the WORST fantasy novel I’ve ever read. I’m not even sure how to define it. But I will list a few that I really didn’t connect with for a variety of reasons.

I’m going to stick to popular books that I couldn’t possibly blemish from my modest soapbox:

I very rarely DNF a book. I can be a bit of a masochist in this regard. Once I start a meal, I tend to choke it all down no matter how rancid it tastes. I DNF Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara. I found the prose to be lifeless and unpolished and the story comically derivative of Tolkien. Fans of the series tell me it gets better from there, and I believe even Brooks himself cops to the first novel’s weaknesses, but one was enough for me, dawg.

I eagerly launched into Jenn Lyons’ A Chorus of Dragons a few years ago and found it completely baffling. I didn’t connect with any of the characters and the story lurches from set piece to set piece with no clear direction. Lyons deploys too much sleight-of-hand to resolve conflicts, including a strange body-swapping dynamic that leads to several cases of mistaken identity. Not for me.

This last one may be controversial given how sweaty BookTube and BookTok can be about James Islington, but I really didn’t connect with the uber-popular Hierarchy series. I read The Will of the Many cover-to-cover in an attempt to grasp what so many readers love about it. I do admire Islington’s ability to connect with a broad audience, and the very end of the book had my attention with some intriguing new story elements, but I couldn’t get past the thin setting, tired tropes, and the workmanlike prose. Islington makes Brandon Sanderson (who I like) look like Gene Wolfe. Felt like reading a shopping list at times.

Next week, someone please ask me to say something nice.