Bad Blurbs for Good Books

A parlor game: write the worst blurb you can imagine for the best book you can think of. For example:

Making Light: This can't be good for one's soul: Plucky heroes travel across a fantasy world, encountering strange creatures and languages (invented by the author!) to destroy a magic artifact, while being pursued by Minions of the Dark Lord. They are aided by a King in Exile, an elven archer, and a wizard with a long beard. People sing at them a lot, occasionally in fake languages (invented by the author!). Did we mention the author made up some languages for the book?

Comments

[KC45s]

He was a stunning mystery man. A soldier in the war. A bootlegger. The owner of a pink tuxedo. When he gazed across the water at the light he knew he had to have her. Daisy Buchanan was a child of privilege, pampered and waited upon, as comfortable on a divan as she was at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Once she had loved and lost, stolen away by the brusque and mustached Tom Buchanan, a lusty master of horses with a car in every garage and a smouldering mistress who refused to share him. When these forces collide, there will be death, drinking, and someone's out-of-control lawn will get trimmed.

Set against the no-holds-barred debaucery of the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby is sure to captivate you. Astonish you. And, yes, there will be a quiz.

[rod]

A woman past her prime falls (across the railroad tracks) in love with someone she is not married to. Her family life is uniquely unhappy. Also, she's cold a lot of the time, because Russia is like that; and her husband is emotionally cold, although not all Russians in this book are like that. In the original, said to be a page turner; opinions vary about the accuracy of translations.

[Patrick]

Hormones rage as the parents of two teenagers forbid them to date. They kill themselves, and against all odds, it really DOES teach everyone a lesson.

Plucky English schoolchildren are transported to a magical land filled with talking creatures who love them unconditionally, except for one wicked old lady who gets killed by the end of the book. Includes a jesus-figure lion.

[Andrew]

Plucky girl tells lies a lot, so she has unique insights into the Truth. Everyone has a delightful companion animal who talks to them, plus an extra immortal soul, plus their own extra extra personal death avatar. Except for bears, who talk to the people but don't have companions, souls or deaths. And little people, and angels. But it all comes out alright in the end. Except it's sad.

Would make a GREAT movie!

[Jeffrey Kramer]

In a world where madness was king; in a time before time; where the bastards have it all their own way and only a Fool can be trusted; one woman -- a lone, renegade princess -- dares to defy all the rules.

[jerry]

Nice Jewish boy falls in with wrong crowd, blamed for their problems and killed. Author telegraphs intent for sequel with deus-ex-machina ending.

Reads like middle book of a trilogy.

[Invigilator]

Poor Russian student kills pawnbroker and gets sent to Siberia by wily detective. Some weird tubercular girl goes with him; meanwhile, a bunch of people get drunk at a funeral they can't really afford.

[Invigilator]

Poor Russian student kills pawnbroker and gets sent to Siberia by wily detective. Some weird tubercular girl goes with him; meanwhile, a bunch of people get drunk at a funeral they can't really afford.

[Maynard Handley]

I think the ideal version of this sort of thing has two characteristics:
(1) It makes the book sound like a cliche and
(2) It kinda completely misses the point.

I'm no good at this sort of thing, but I'd imagine the platonic ideal is something like (for Gravity's Rainbow):
A sprawling epic set in the turmoil of European World War 2, this sidesplitting yarn follows the sexual adventures of our hero, Tyrone Slothrop, a James Bond-like figure, in his adventures across the war zone as he tracks down a mysterious new Nazi weapon.

[Maynard Handley]

Note: proof read before submitting! Minor changes below.

I think the ideal version of this sort of thing has two characteristics:
(1) It makes the book sound like a cliche and
(2) It kinda completely misses the point.

I'm no good at this sort of thing, but I'd imagine the platonic ideal is something like (for Gravity's Rainbow):
A sprawling epic set in the turmoil of European World War 2, this sidesplitting yarn follows the sexual conquests of our hero, Tyrone Slothrop, a James Bond-like figure, in his adventures across the war zone as he tracks down a mysterious new Nazi weapon.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

Maynard, when Waiting for Godot first came to the U.S., it was advertised as "the laugh riot of two continents."

[andres]

A lot of work has kept me from posting for a while now, but Brad's idea is just too good to pass up:

A grimly funny yet epic look at small-time anti-heroes who defeat a juggernaut-like enemy, laced with dozes of Kurt Vonnegut-style irony. A greedy butcher who benefits his neighbors in spite of his depraved habit of quartering four-legged mammals. An avaricious baker who does good for his fellow citizens by feeding them excessive quantities of glutinous carbohydrates. A lazy, shiftless 9-year old Bart Simpson wanna-be who gets out from under the workhouse by creating a mechanical pin hammer. Led by a wise but stuttering sage, these unlikely heroes are pitted against the forces of the Corporate Empire that wishes to crush the rebellion across the ocean and to make all mankind slaves to the Dark Side of Monopoly.

A brilliant retelling of an old legend by by an author who is a suspiciously unmarried ivory tower academic with a fetish for invisible body parts, this 5-book epic will inspire generations to come...

[Diamond Jim]

Jeffrey Kramer, that line about Godot is funny, but properly done it *is* a laugh riot (remember the star of the first American production was Bert Lahr, and the celebrated Lincoln Center production of about a decade ago had Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Bill Irwin; Beckett was such a fan of Buster Keaton's, his only movie is a short starring Keaton). Thing is, properly done it makes you cry at the same time.

Btw, your contest entry is the runaway winner for my money.

[Diamond Jim]

Jeffrey Kramer, that line about Godot is funny, but properly done it *is* a laugh riot (remember the star of the first American production was Bert Lahr, and the celebrated Lincoln Center production of about a decade ago had Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Bill Irwin; Beckett was such a fan of Buster Keaton's, his only movie is a short starring Keaton). Thing is, properly done it makes you cry at the same time.

Btw, your contest entry is the runaway winner for my money.

[stanfo]

In this story of twisted love a railroad exec, an engineer, a playboy, and a corporate steel man cross paths in their quest to find true love. Ironically, they unionize, and go on strike while they try to discover just who it is they really love. Can the author succeed in showing that they only love themselves?

[Julian Elson]

A brilliantly deductive Franciscan monk-detective with a dark past journeys with his simple-minded young sidekick to solve a series of mysterious deaths in a monastery with a labyrinthine library filled with forbidden lore.

[walkingtheline]

@Julian - It can find a horse. Can deductive rationalism find a lost library book? Don't skip the titillating chapters on medieval biblical rancour: theology has never been so interesting!

[Roger Bigod]

A heartwarming coming-of-age story set in the French countryside, in which the plucky hero struggles against asthma and the distractions of the zany, fun-loving Guermantes family to discover the secret of the Mystery Madelaine. Part of a series.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

Thanks for the vote, Diamond Jim, and I agree about Godot (but still sympathize with that first-night audience).

[Patrick]

An innocent young girl falls in love with a secretly married man, who has cunningly concealed his wife from the girl by forcibly imprisoning her within the attic.

[Julian Elson]

walkingtheline -- I concede utter, humiliating defeat to your superior bad blurbing.

[uberdave]

He's exotic, older, experienced. She's young, but not so innocent as she seems. The steamy love story that ensues as this star-crossed couple travel cross country will get readers' blood pumping. But what will happen when Detective Quilty sets his sights on the pair -- and falls for the girl?

[Julian Elson]

A Clint Eastwood-lookalike loner chasing after a crazy sorcerer massacres a whole town with his six-guns. Then he comes to an old gas station and picks up a precocious, overprivileged and underloved young WASP boy from 70s New York City. Then he has sex with a horny succubus made of air and gets her to give him an obscure prophecy while tripping on mescaline. Then he gets the boy killed, finds the crazy sorcerer, and they talk about stoned freshman dormroom-style pseudo-philosophical bullshit for a long time before he falls asleep and wakes up ten years older and the sorcerer turns into a skeleton. Then he goes down to the beach.

[Julian Elson]

... and, come to think of it, I think that _The Gunslinger_ is probably the Dark Tower book that's *least* susceptible to bad-blurbing. Although around the time of The Wolves of the Calla, they start becoming genuinely mediocre books, not just fairly good books about which one can easily write bad blurbs. (People with better taste in literature than myself might claim that they were always mediocre, not just Dark Tower V-VII, although I think The Gunslinger, The Waste Lands, and Wizard and Glass were pretty good (The Waste Lands was the best, I think), and The Drawing of the Three was at least decent.)