As a younger man I visited Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

It started pouring rain in the afternoon so we ducked into a bookstore to try and wait it out, and also to browse around.

There was an author in the store that day, promoting her new book. A kindly old southern lady who was being completely ignored by everyone. Being a Canadian with a heavily ingrained sense of politeness, I stopped by her stand to pick up one of her books and read the back, I just felt bad that here she was with a book she poured her heart and soul into, and everyone was ignoring her. It was a sort of ghost story mystery thing. The author chatted with me a bit, then signed a copy for me, and I bought it. It looked from the outside like it could be a decent read, but I would not have bought it if I hadn’t been trying to be nice to the author.

Years later I can’t even remember the title, but I do remember Just how much it sucked.

First off, regular typos and grammatical mistakes. Secondly, all the sins of a crappy author. Weird sex stuff, non-sequiters, plot points that made no sense, weird contrivances. It was just bad.

On our drive back to Canada I read probably a quarter of it before deciding it was a terrible mistake to buy a copy.