I have two. The Ritual and Drowning.
The Ritual is pure smut. 61 chapters and every one contains a graphic, demeaning sex scene. I’m convinced the author was an adult film screenwriter and decided to try their hand at writing a novel. There isn’t a single likable character in this book.
Drowning isn’t a great work of literature. I felt that the characters were very two-dimensional. I hated how naive the author made the protagonist. It made me have a lack of sympathy for her. The ending was series finale of Dexter bad.
Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor. Could not finish it. It made me mad enough to give it away as soon as I gave up on it, I didn’t even want to look at it.
I love literary fiction, surrealism, and all that that implies. I love having to wrack my brain to understand the sequence of words the author is putting in front of me. Not all the time, I read straightforward narratives to cool down between complex stuff. I’m saying this to qualify that I know what good surrealism feels like and that was not good surrealism. I don’t know what that was. It felt like a 10th grader who likes to think of themselves as an intellectual wrote it.
I love the audiodrama version and urge you to give that a try. I cannot imagine that WtNV translates at all well into novel form (and am kind of confused about why they’d even try that), but it’s fantastic to listen to. My only issue is how many fucking ADS are in there and it’s made me loathe Joseph Fink, which kind of sours the whole experience. Probably 1/3 of each episode is ads… but yeah, I still recommend you give it a listen