Good Examples of Bad Storytelling

A bad writer can crash a good idea

Angry literate trucker noises.

WELP.

I don’t normally do this, but after a few weeks of screaming into the abyss, I’ve got to say something about these books, so why not do it on Substack, where only the most dedicated, distinguished, sexy readers will imbibe of it?

I’ve read a couple of bad books this year. Really freaking bad books. Bad enough that I jumped into a GC with The Homies (TM) and ranted and raved about how the author wasted a good premise. Let’s dissect them here.

Content note: this discussion will necessitate the mention of various tawdry things, to highlight the poor execution.

Book the first: Dire Wolves in Yellowstone

This book should have had me from the jump. There are people dying randomly in Yellowstone National Park (a place I love), and the culprit is a pack of dire wolves that survived their species’ general extinction after the Ice Age (awesome.)

The problem is twofold: first, the characters all suck. Second, the story had absolutely no surprises.

That isn’t to say you need to reinvent the wheel, but with the monster-attack genre, you’ve got to show me something different from every other book or movie in this vein. If I already know what’s going to happen, and I get to the end, and I’m right, all you’ve done is bore me and waste my time, which is a crime I cannot endure.

The Characters Sucking:

Our main character is a park ranger lady named Sam, who possesses large breasts and is promiscuous (with said breasts, but presumably other things too). Everyone is interested in Sam (and her breasts) no matter the context. Did someone call in a wolf attack? The survivors notice her cleavage. Did she study the corpse of the victim? The coroner noticed when she bent over to inspect the bite marks. Did she report the attack to her superiors? Her boss heard her boobs over the phone.

There’s this meme about men writing women, we refer to it in shorthand as “Breasted Boobily.” It goes like this:

This is a textbook case of Breasted Boobily. Sam, in her late thirties or something, even takes on an intern for the summer, a 22 year-old student who has a serious girlfriend Back Home, and even he can’t help flirting or shooting his shot with Sammary’s Mammaries, while she gives monologues about how much she likes the attention but doesn’t like being tied down by relationships.

There’s also a rich guy, some millionaire dude associated with a university, who brings hot co-ed college girls to the park every summer ostensibly so that he can give them extra credit for studying biology, and yes, that is a euphemism, as well as his stated purpose for the internships. He was just as obnoxious as Sam, though he brought the horny, while she merely cultivated it.

There were other characters too but they all sucked. You get the idea. The ones that weren’t two-dimensional were one-dimensional, taken straight from the pages of a SyFy Channel script. By the middle of the book I was cheering for the wolves.

The Predictable Story:

Do you want to know what happens in this book? Think of the movie Pirahna 3D. Maybe Arachnophobia. Anything with a big monster in it that kills people and the local Sort-of Expert has to figure it out in between their mundane job. You now know what happens in DIRUS.

The book opens with a traveling pervert peeping on a kid at Yellowstone. He’s about to kidnap the girl when he gets attacked by wolves. (I lied, I’m already cheering for the wolves.) Later the wolves attack people who don’t deserve it, and they start attacking bison and other things in the park.

Oh crap, we’d better put a stop to this! Let’s sit around and talk about our hormones for ten pages though, until we get a call that something else got eaten near a vistor’’s center…

It just goes on and on.

The Fix

The right way to tackle this concept is a story like The Ghost in the Darkness, the movie with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglass having to hunt a pair of rogue lions in Africa. Give them a character reason for doing so, give us some stakes and substance, and for crying out loud, turn down the horny. Maybe Sam is a widow and her husband was killed by wolves who became dependent on humans after raiding too many camps or eating the trash. (Granted that behavior is mostly attributed to bears but you could make it work.)

She hates having to put down animals that were tweaked by humans, but as the attacks progress, she realizes this is something else, and she has to move past her own predictions and think outside the box to understand these wolves. The horny millionaire college biologist could actually be the guy who explains to her how species change and evolve over millennia in response to their environment, and while that’s something she always heard of, she sees it up close when she confronts these dire wolf attacks.

Most dire wolves died out when the Ice Age ended, these ones didn’t, and now they’re trying to reassert themselves in Yellowstone, a place actively protected by man, and thus unnatural to the dire wolves. She could learn that everyone is just trying to adapt and survive and that every adaptation has its consequences; in this case, the wolves that adapted to an environment with 21st century man were just surviving the way they knew how when they killed her husband.

This helps her to deal with her own feelings, her own hurt, and just do her job effectively to continue protecting the park, including putting down or relocating dire wolves if she has to. She can even be a little nicer to camp visitors, compared to how she was at the beginning, after going through this experience.

By all means have some humor and heart, not whatever the hell this was. Give us a reason to care about the character.

Book the second: College Co-eds Hunted by Bigfoot

Apparently the formula is “Monster hunts dumb people, written by [Italian name]” and hopefully that’s just a coincidence.

I’ll be brief in my assessment here for a few reasons: I didn’t make it as far into BH as I did with DIRUS, because the writing was way worse, and the characters sucked way harder. Long blocks of dialogue, lots of college-aged emotional dumping, too much focus on who was trying to have sex with who and which character was dumb enough to fall for what pickup line, etc.

One of the characters was bringing his sister along and he focused entirely too much on whether she was going to have sex that weekend. There was also one guy who was a Fake Indian (feathers, not dots) and you could see that twist coming a mile away, from the first scene. He talked about “his people” and going on “spirit walks,” and the dumb girls thought it was so cool, and the guys knew it was BS. When the reveal dropped, I felt less than nothing. This was right around the first Bigfoot attack.

Oh yeah, they’re out hunting Bigfoot in the woods, except oh no, Bigfoot is actually hunting them! Let’s get some paragraphs from Bigfoot’s perspective, including scenes where he smells small female people and bad car-smell people and grrr, rage, want to kill those ones and eat them, grrr, want to kill and eat everything, grrr…

If there is nobody for me to cheer for, give me someone to cheer against, and if I’m cheering against everybody, then I’m cheering for me—the reader—to escape this book. So I do that.

In this one the biggest issue, other than the prose and the annoying clichés, was the lack of competence from the cast. I don’t need them all to be good at everything, but I need many of them to be good at something, and then we can go into a try-and-fail cycle as they get stuck in the woods, realize Bigfoot is hunting them, and the eventually resort to an unconventional (but successful) way of evading him and escaping.

Conclusion

I put stories like this in a box next to Alfred Hitchcock and say “Hitchcock shows you how to do this, the other guys show you how not to.” Hitchcock scared you but his stories were often about people being resourceful when facing their fears. They had strengths and had to find new ways to use them. Or they would be forced to confront their limitations, and be honest with themselves about their flaws.

Both of these books were about crappy people getting dragged along by a plot, written so poorly that there was no reason to keep going after a certain point. Some readers did, and some readers liked it, and good for them. I’m all for people liking things.

And yeah, I’m on a kick where I don’t care all that much for negative criticism of stuff, even from people who are in the arena. (Like me.)

But every once in a while, you come across something that just irritates you so much, you might as well say something. Both of these books were bad, and in the same way, and the world deserves better fiction about cryptids and Ice Age animals.

Maybe I’ll get to that someday.

Meanwhile, go check out my books on Amazon and see which one interests you. I recommend KILL THE BEAST. It’s cheap, it’s short, the paperback is illustrated, and the audiobook has a native Parisian narrator. (That’s also an affiliate link, I get a small piece of the price when you buy through there.)