…So bad. Such incongruity. So many questions.

Why is the skull old but the brains fresh? What does a skull that looks like a particularly tasteless garden ornament piled with offal have to do with a plague that “…brings the world to an end in an insane frenze [sic] of lust and violence…” Was the word “frenze” intentional?

The back cover and blurb don’t tell me much more. “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…”

This is quite entertaining, although reading the book for anything other than laughs would surely make your head explode. A nice coffee table book for when the in-laws visit, perhaps?

-Agnes.

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.

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

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

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.

“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.

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

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…”