Terrible original/published fiction?

Also, I feel the scene would have been less laughable if it was, say, a small falcon; still small and apparently almost completely harmless, a very fast bird with sharp claws a couple of inches away from her face but clearly not capable of actually killing a person, and people don't look at it and immediately think it's funny as they do with chickens.

 

Eh, I think that would lose the intended effect of the mundane and familiar and harmless becoming non-harmless. Even falcons used for falconry aren't tame; the assumption if you saw one in your barn would be that it's a wild animal that got in. A better way out might be to pick a different familiar animal- a cat would be particularly easy, as per that thing you linked.

(I also think a large part of the problem is that "chicken" is an inherently funny word. Just. The sound of it is not conducive to horror.)

 

The "evil cackle" only compounds the funny word problem.

 

Surely that's the point, though. The utter ridiculousness of a chicken being a monster destroys all you thought you knew about the world.

It's like when Robin Williams played a serial killer. Or even John Lithgow.

It's Just Not Okay.

 

True, but Goodkind pretty obviously doesn't have the emotional writing chops to pull it off. I'm with the person Chel quoted on Stephen King being able to do it- the laughably mundane gone subtly off and more horrifying for its laughable mundanity is one of his favorite topics. But even he's often walking the line of unintentional hilarity and he's got a lot of duds and terrible adaptations because of it, and if you don't have his skill at writing the emotion of people in danger from the unknown, you're almost certainly going to land on the silly side.

 

Oh, if we're talking about what Goodkind could have pulled off... heh, I totally agree.

There should be cover versions of books.

 

If he'd called it a hen, would that have helped?

 

No. Maybe if he'd called it a rooster. All chickens are dinosaurs, but only the roosters remember.

 

Point. I don't think there's any saving the "evil cackle".

 

... no. That's not what they sound like. I mean, "evil" is completely fair, but they don't cackle.

 

To be fair, I think the evil chicken can talk too, so it could hypothetically cackle, but "evil cackle" would be a terrible description for a human antagonist's action too.

 

Okay, got further into Battlefield Earth, and Hubbard... just forgot that the other planets in the solar system exist. Really. He had someone refer to Earth as the sun's "only planet". Despite the fact that we know he knew Venus exists because he claimed to have astral-travelled there. What. WHAT.

 

Perhaps he accidentally a word?

Like, “habitable,” maybe.

 

If it was any other author I'd assume that was it, but given the sheer ridiculousness of the rest of the book...

 

Especially odd bad writing is when the "she had a personality and eyes" descriptions and constant Nice Guy-esque picking on women we're used to from pretentious literature comes from an openly gay writer.

 

Okay, this RPG is horrifying on many, many levels. Creepy levels of fetishism, unnecessary rape, Everything Trying To Kill You, poorly thought-out morality and set-up...

 

Here's another RPG manual with some really weird interpretations of dinosaurs:

 

More horrible RPGs, this time featuring HISTORICAL ACCURACY. Also a distinct lack of actual mechanics in favor of wank, and the HIGHEST LEVEL OF ALL.

Also, a Zodiac Table, which is actually kind of neat. At least until they decide to make it COMPLETELY RANDOM.

 

Thread about bad romance novels (tw rape, NSFW) has a lot:

That was also the thread I mentioned ages ago where an author was quoted as calling stairs "members of the timbered community".

 

There was another romance novel I don't remember the title of, described thus in a comment on Smart Bitches Trashy Books: "All I remember about it was this: 1) The only likeable character was the hero's pet marten. 2) At one point they milked a billy goat."