So bad, it's funny...

[LeandraNyx]

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[oggbashan]

Years ago (in 2003) the Authors' Hangout cooperated on a bad fiction Chain Story.

I had the dishonour of starting the chain:

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-worst-chain-story-ever-ch-01

It became the "worst chain story" for several reasons. Some of the episodes were never written; some didn't follow on from the previous episode; and every participant did their worst...

The DurtGurl consortium also added some classic stories e.g.

https://www.literotica.com/s/patty-makes-the-team

 

[LeandraNyx]

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[CyranoJ]

Granddaddy of them all: the infamous slush-pile fiction The Eye of Argon as read by Yahtzee Croshaw and his co-host Gabriel, who do the classic party game wherein you have to read the story as long as you can without laughing aloud (this is not easy to put it mildly) and with all spelling and punctuation mistakes intact.

In similar vein, My Immortal read by Mr. Pogington. I wonder if this is the same guy who narrated the Legolas thing.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any audio online for Naked Came the Stranger by "Penelope Ashe." My other favourite entry in the "books so bad they're good" sweepstakes and the product of a project not unlike ogg's "worst chain story ever."

 

[LeandraNyx]

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[HandsInTheDark]

Granddaddy of them all: the infamous slush-pile fiction The Eye of Argon...

Eye was in its way amazing. Even the MST guys had a go at it. It won awards in contests it wasn't even submitted to.

The best part - for years, the only online copies were missing the last page - it ended mid sentence. You struggled through and you weren't even rewarded with the closure of an ending.

Someone finally turned up the last page - maybe three sentences long - and there was still no real closure; the author just sort of stopped. Nothing could have been more fitting.

It's still hard not to recall the "lithe and opaque nose" the tortured grammar managed to suggest at one point. I mean I do agree noses are at their best when opaque. And I guess lithe could be an interesting selling point. But for anyone who demands that grammar's not too critical, this is your story.

 

[Bramblethorn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

Bunch of published authors collaborated to write the worst rubbish they could and submit it to a vanity publisher to show up their (lack of) standards.

 

[NotWise]

Eye was in its way amazing. Even the MST guys had a go at it. It won awards in contests it wasn't even submitted to.

The best part - for years, the only online copies were missing the last page - it ended mid sentence. You struggled through and you weren't even rewarded with the closure of an ending.

I'm not sure when the last time was that I laughed so hard. It wears a little thin by the end, but my belly aches anyway.

 

[CyranoJ]

That was as hard to listen to as it was funny, which is to say, very. God in heaven, so many adjectives...

They don't even make it all the way through. The full glorys of chapter 7 and chapter 7 1/2 even yet await the perusal of thy throbbing optical orbs, he sighed mirthfully with a grunt as as he provendered the pulsating hyper-link ?

It's still hard not to recall the "lithe and opaque nose" the tortured grammar managed to suggest at one point. I mean I do agree noses are at their best when opaque. And I guess lithe could be an interesting selling point. But for anyone who demands that grammar's not too critical, this is your story.

And how. My personal favourite is still:

"Aye! The ways of our civilization are in many ways warped and distorted, but what is your calling," she queried, bustily?

 

[Bramblethorn]

And how. My personal favourite is still:

"By the surly beard of Mrifk!" still gets used occasionally around these parts. Fond memories of reading Eye of Argon around the campfire and trying not to laugh.

 

[jehoram]

"By the surly beard of Mrifk!" still gets used occasionally around these parts. Fond memories of reading Eye of Argon around the campfire and trying not to laugh.

That brings me back! I first encountered Eye of Argon at a sci-fi convention, where it was passed around among a dozen people or so. The rule of the game was that when you started to laugh or giggle, you had to pass the book along to the next person. And if you could read an entire page with a straight face, you had to pass the book along on the grounds that your sense of humor was obviously stunted.

This was in the days before the internet, and we had a fuzzy Xerox copy, complete with illlustrations. What made it even weirder was that a lot of the readers were either writers or editors, and some of them were in physical pain upon encountering so many typos and malaprops in such a confined space.

And I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Bulwer-Lytton contest, where the idea is to write the worst possible opening sentence of a genre. They have a web site

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

A friend of mine actually won a "dishonorable mention" one year. No prize but glory, though.

 

[LeandraNyx]

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[HandsInTheDark]

"A faint glimmer sparked from the pair of deep blue ovals of the amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticing him to join her."

Someone needs to write a fanfic based on the "amorous female."

It's been done. I think they call it "Literotica".

And while the story as a whole is a riot of wrong adjectives, a "faint" glimmer? I want a brilliant sparkle before I take this shameless slut seriously.

 

[CyranoJ]

Someone needs to write a fanfic based on the "amorous female."

A woman with the ability to frame her own face in her bosoms and kick the ichor out of the balls of hostile cultists would be truly unique, no doubt.

Actually the whole business deserves a sequel. "The Spleen of Sargon"?

ZOMG I'm really tempted, now. Replicating the style would be a deliciously horrible challenge.

 

[oggbashan]

It's been done. I think they call it "Literotica".

...

I don't think so. There are stories (really!) on the video porn site xhamster. Some of those stories make the worst on Literotica look like masterpieces.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

A woman with the ability to frame her own face in her bosoms and kick the ichor out of the balls of hostile cultists would be truly unique, no doubt.

You never watched Xena?

ZOMG I'm really tempted, now. Replicating the style would be a deliciously horrible challenge.

It's not hard. Hang a lurid adjective - often a completely inappropriate one - on every amazing noun.

Use adverbs when they aren't useful and bustily forget to use them sometimes when they'd help.

Get it's and its wrong; mess up possessives in general. Don't sweat spelling or the punctuation. An exclamation mark fixes everything!

Forget where you are, mid sentence: "Tables were clustered with groups of drunken thieves, and cutthroats, tossing dice, or making love to willing prostitutes." Making love? On the tables?

"'From where do you come barbarian, and by what are you called?' Gasped the complying wench, as Grignr smothered her lips with the blazing touch of his flaming mouth." Yeah, she's pretty talkative for being smothered by a mouth, and a flaming one no less.

That's 98% of the style.

I mean if you dig under the words, the plot holds up as well as some strokers here. The problems are entirely linguistic.

 

[CyranoJ]

You never watched Xena?

The really funny thing is that the storytelling on that show actually kicks the crap out of 75% of what Robert Howard ever wrote.

It's not hard. [etc.]

Agreed. It's just remembering to make all the characteristic errors that might get challenging.

 

[LeandraNyx]

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[Bramblethorn]

It's not hard. Hang a lurid adjective - often a completely inappropriate one - on every amazing noun.

Thesaurus mining FTW. EoA rotates "stygian", "ebony", and "charcoal" for places where a lesser author would use "black".

Forget where you are, mid sentence: "Tables were clustered with groups of drunken thieves, and cutthroats, tossing dice, or making love to willing prostitutes." Making love? On the tables?

It's possible that he was using "making love" in the old sense of "wooing" rather than outright fornication. I guess? Maybe? *flails hopelessly*

 

[RetroFan]

Can anyone recommend any Literotica stories they have read that fall into the 'So Bad It's Good' category?

 

[CyranoJ]

Can anyone recommend any Literotica stories they have read that fall into the 'So Bad It's Good' category?

I really don't want to feel like I'm mocking amateur writers on an amateur site, personally. Doesn't seem cricket. What makes something like 'Eye of Argon' fair game is that it's decades removed from the initial crime against prose, and many other similar entries are deliberate satires of bad writing.

 

[oggbashan]

Can anyone recommend any Literotica stories they have read that fall into the 'So Bad It's Good' category?

I've mentioned DurtGurl above...

 

[HandsInTheDark]

It's possible that he was using "making love" in the old sense of "wooing" rather than outright fornication. I guess? Maybe? *flails hopelessly*

Um.. the author was 16 at the time and I don't see evidence he knew much about older word usage. Or ANY word usage. If he actually used it as wooing, it's probably the one good sentence in the work. But I have trouble believing it and he's dead so we can't ask.

It's interesting to speculate how his writing would have developed if he hadn't gotten the fame he did, and subsequently swore he'd never write again (proof, by the way, that shaming the incompetent has a place in the world.) Would he have learned that opaque isn't really the best word to describe noses, and settled into better prose?

Or would he - just consider this - have developed a style that made worse and worse word choices work for him, ultimately making a deep commentary on the human condition and the futility of communication? And so ultimately contrived through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other, leaving one with a profound and vivid insight into... into... uh... whatever the story was about?

 

[LeandraNyx]

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[CeasarBoobage]

I'm in the process of reading Atlanta Nights. It's... well, it's so painfully funny that it's hard to take in one sitting. The whole thing is so bad it's almoat making me try to write something similar to see if I can screw it up as well as they did in the name of fun.