L’Yan’s continuing obsession with bad blurbs
I love terrible blurbs. Although they are often unhelpful when I am trying to categorise a book, they at least give me a good laugh.
How’s this for a phenomenally terrible blurb:
Shirley is a prostitute. She thinks she knows all her customers: the first-timers, the talkers, the lookers, the hard guys, even the occasional psychopath. But, Mr Fox is no ordinary customer: who ever heard of a punter who quoted T.S. Eliot or arranged meetings at the Tate? With their every encounter she becomes more and more confused. Is it just a scripted pick-up? Or perhaps some bizarre kind of God-game? Love-Act toys with the reader’s curiosity right to the very end. It could be a book about seduction and manipulation or truth and invention or desire and the end of desire. Or not. It is for the reader to discover where the conundrums of M.E. Austen’s taunting game can lead in a first novel of rare and compelling ingenuity.
Blurb from M. E. Austen’s Love Act, Black Swan, 1982
An entirely unhelpful blurb of “rare and compelling” stupidity. I love it.
Filed under BOOKS, Covers so bad we love 'em | Tags: bad blurb | Comment (1)Covers so bad-Too many cooks
An all but ordinary cover except for the slain gingerbread man and the stained cooks knife. When the blurb on the back of a book includes words like; hot new romance, gorgeous homicide detective, pretentious boss and seamy sex scandals, you know that the book could have been written using a romance template no thesaurus required.
Magda
Covers so bad… The Incredible Melting Man by Phil Smith
The incredible book of the incredible movie. We love: the messy melty zombieness, and the feeble attempt at a swirling hellish background. Also the subtitle exclamation, sans deserved punctuation: “he is a human time bomb”. Blurb extract: “On the run from… the dreadful organism which had taken possession of his flesh, turning him into a fiendish nightmare but leaving his mind intact to cringe from the murderous horror he had become”. Disgustingly wonderful. Incredible, even. All this could be yours for five bucks. ONO.
L’Yan
Filed under Covers so bad we love 'em | Tags: Covers so bad, Recycled Books | Comments OffCovers so bad… The Other Side of the Night by Edmund Schiddel
You may read this and think we are kidding. The sad thing is, we are not. Here, word for word, is the worst blurb we have ever read:
Their wealth was so great… there was EDWINA, a 400-pound behemoth who believed she was God; her lascivious daughter, JULIE, who thrilled over seducing and then torturing her men; PETER, who sold his soul for a glittery world he now hates; ANASTASIA, raped by a regiment during the Russian Revolution, now despises herself and the son that came of it; and CHARLES, Julie’s weak, impotent husband whose every breath seared with jealous rage.
Surrounded by the luxury and laughter of the very rich, they filled their empty days with exotic drugs and bizarre sex on an endless treadmill of highs and lows.
We love - the cover quote from the New York Times: “…his best book…”. Oh dear.
Filed under BOOKS, Covers so bad we love 'em | Tags: Covers so bad | Comment (0)Covers so bad…Three Quarters by G De Timms
“Jelly fish, stewed in the boiling sea, flopped around his head. The sand was red and sizzled; the pebbles burned and a prune walked across his stomach.”
Truly disgusting.
Covers so bad…Cry for tomorrow by Bob Aylott
True life drama of forbidden love in terror city. Their love feeds on a happier tomorrow. But the brutal vengeance of the IRA sometimes cannot wait….
We love: the blue eye shadow, the tomato sauce effect and the brutal soldier.
This book is for sale at JimmyD’s Bookshop – $4.00
Covers so bad…..Soma by Charles Platt
Imprisoned on Chthon, … Aton was forced by his captors into a training program calculated to turn him into the ultimate tool of unreasoning destruction. Published by Grafton Books, 1988. Front cover illustration is by Bruno Elletori.
We love: the broad blade, the discreet handling of the beheaded body and the scream.
Comment:
“The pose of the man replicates the pose of an Ancient Greek relief sculpture, that of Perseus slaying the Gorgon…a delicious allusion!
I love your “Covers so bad, we love them!” section…as I said, I thought it might be interesting to turn some of the covers into blank gift cards by sticking the front cover “wholus bolus” onto a folded piece of card the same size as the cover. They did this at “Sapho’s Books” in Glebe (my old haunt!). To the best of my knowledge, the sale of said cards is still going strong…I think you and your staff share the knowledge, vibrancy and enthusiasm for books, readers and litterature that the great Katerina Cosgrove once imbued to Sapho’s Books…”
Filed under Covers so bad we love 'em | Tags: Bad Covers, Charles Platt | Comment (0)