I’ve been wondering about this. Colleen Hoover is well known as the sort of poster girl for sloppily written, baffling and aggressively mediocre books.
What was the equivalent to her in previous times? Like the Romantic or Modernist period?
During the the 1890s, what book was considered “embarassing” or super low brow to be caught with (in the same way the book community largely treats It Ends With Us)?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame. Actually, that’s just the first clause of the most impossible run-on sentence ever to start a novel – it makes you want to give up before you read anything more.
Perhaps Bulwer-Lytton’s most famous novel was The Coming Race, a sort of sci-fi fantasy about this “superior” race who went underground and lived beneath the earth’s crust. They had this strange power called “vril.” It was Heinrich Himmler’s favorite novel.