The worst books in the world, badly reviewed, by a moron.
Unnecessarily wordy introduction
It is with a mounting and tangible pleasure that I come to you tonight with a pre-emptive salvation - with information so important that it could well be as epoch-defining as the Gospels on which the foundations of the western world securely rest. And, like Christianity’s Good Book, the story I have to tell is of unusual origin and composition; to their Romans and people of Galilee, I have 19th Century Russian aristocracy. They brought you the Ultimate's scion, borne of an unbroken woman – I bring you existentially bombastic apes.Heed me, ye tired wanderers of literature's endless path – for I come with great news.And it starts, as all good tales do, with a profound defeat.* The past month has been full of new experiences for me: I've discussed period pains and womb cramps without an involuntary shiver of evil running down my spine...I've discovered one can subsist entirely off pasta floating in a variety of alchemical compositions...and I have been defeated by not one, but two books. For the first time in 22 years, I haven't been able to finish a book once I started reading it. I know, it doesn't sound like a big deal, but as I reluctantly closed the covers of the first novel someone outside my window got stabbed. The Universe cares.**Second Genesis...is first on our list of literary abortions for this evening. It took just 20 pages for SG to defeat me – twenty pages of depressed sighs, emotive grimaces and uncomfortable silences. Though it was nigh on 5 weeks ago that the contents of this awful first chapter passed my eyes, they're still regrettably burned into my psyche, and are recounted for you below.The book as a whole starts as it means to go on: Really, really badly. Underneath the blurb on the back cover is a tagline in large green letters:“SURVIVAL IS AN INSTINCT....SO IS FEAR!”The author (providence has robbed me of his name or I'd be writing this camped outside his house) has, before we've cracked open the musty covers of the book, presented us with something totally devoid of meaning or emotional significance. The second line of the above has got nothing to do with anything. Fear is part of the survival instinct, prodding one to preservation by virtue of coating your shorts in excrement and then running the hell away. One can only assume that considered and rejected options ran along the same, utterly irrelevant lines.SURVIVAL IS AN INSTINCT...SO IS HUNGER!DONT FORGET TO EAT WELL,A BALANCED DIET IS IMPORTANT.The book is set in a jungle. In a country. Somewhere or other. Earth. The exact location isn’t important - all we need to know is that the jungle is hot and contains a (failing) camp full of scientists, and one of these scientists is a woman, with breasts. Breasts wet with humidity. Breasts so wet with humidity that her shirt is sticking to them uncomfortably, embarrassing her in front of the swarthy native worker she's trying to get freaky with. He has, not at all typically, “dark, mysterious eyes”. FFS.After two utterly awful paragraphs about her flirtatious posturing, horny scientist decides her genitals aren't going to be called into play any time soon and so leaves to go for a run. We’re informed that swarthy native boy steals a glance at her bottie on the way out, calming any fears we may have had that she was unattractive. Already we're endeared to this woman only as a hormone-driven, uncomfortably moist hack scientist who could quite easily be replaced as a plot device by a malfunctioning dildo in a swimming pool.So. She's running and she's thinking and the run and the energy and the rhythmic slap of her feet against the fronds clears her mind and it's all very much an advert for Nike shoes from the early 90s. You're a power woman. Fill those lungs. Stretch those thighs. Make that sports bra work for its pay – right now you're independent and strong, but enjoy it because soon you're going to be back fiddling with a microscope, filling a small lake with secretions from your chest and mentally fixating on the puff and stuff of a teenage boy. Whoops! She slips and slides and falls down somewhere or other and comes across a forty foot wire fence.Bear in mind that this camp of several hundred people has existed for two years and that she's been running for ten minutes along her favourite route. The reader can only presume that this enormous mile long barrier had remained unnoticed up until now, perhaps because none of the scientists in question ever deviate even the smallest distance from their camp. Or maybe because the author is a lazy SOB and couldn’t think of a better way to introduce it. Whatever. Scientist lady, displaying the sound-judgement that has endeared her to her profession, chooses not to report this anomaly but to throw a vine over the massive magical fence and explore the inside, with no concern or consideration of possible danger to herself, or the contents of this obviously protected enclosure. On the plus side, this explains why her jungle-based venture is slowly failing; it seems to be staffed exclusively by people as bright as broken 5 watt bulbs submerged under a tar-pit.Inside the enclosure she stumbles around for a little while before she sees two apes, sitting on the floor.Now: a little bit of serious exposition. The sci-fi savvy reader may at this point suspect that all will not be natural with these apes. They reside, for example, in a mysterious and well guarded enclosure. They are the lone live things there, the sole focus of the narrative, and most tellingly, they're being discovered by a scientist, who (if she ever displays any indication of intelligence) would be a good character to notice and investigate natural anomalies. Our suspicions are enforced when the author slyly mentions that the mother ape, in between watching her child cavort and touching herself, is delicately balancing rocks on top of each other.This is a good move. The average reader won't know that much about rock-related ape play, and this could be simple, innocent behaviour. We could be thrown off the scent. Obviously that’s too subtle for Second Genesis though, and we’re led to believe it’s not normal behaviour because:a) The author devotes three paragraphs to it,andb) The act of stacking the rocks makes mummy ape considerably smarter than everything else we've encountered in the book so far.
That's NOT ENOUGH THOUGH. This writer does NOT rest on his laurels! A soupcon of intrigue isn't going to satisfy his audience - the subtle hint of attraction at the start of the book was more or less replaced by a flood of vaginal fluid, so why should he change tack now? No! The baby ape walks over to Horny Scientist with “a disturbingly intelligent look” in its eyes, but that's STILL NOT ENOUGH. It picks up a stick and starts to draw things in the ground! Pictograms? No! Hieroglyphs? No! Stick men? NO!What the ape writes in front of her is:“WHO AM I?”BANG - THIS CHAPTER IS DONE. Ideally the reader here is rocked to his core – the adorable rock-stacking simians have shown themselves to be inquisitive sentient beings mired in an existential funk. No poo-flinging here I'm afraid. This is stupendous. Astounding. A literary coup de grace within the first 20 pages. Not ONLY has this ape the intelligence to question his or her own existence, he or she can do it in clearly formulated, grammatically perfect English. (Or, to put it in a slightly different way, they're just about demonstrably literate and they don't mind approaching strangers with absurd text. Remind you of anyone, author whose name I can't remember?). Not able to rely on subtlety or nuance, we’ve been coshed over the head with the melodrama-stuffed sock of literary effluence. I didn't read past the end of this chapter, but the following ingredients are all fairly predictable. She'll form a bond, the apes will turn evil, there will be ethically dubious individuals and at some point firelight will gleam off the ripping biceps of the swarthy well-endowed teenager, as he joins her and they dunk themselves headfirst into the profane. Maybe an ape will be watching. I don't know.This book, sad to say, has by my own fault been released to the wild and is circulating on the London Underground system. It bears a sticker on the front cover that reads as follows:“Hello. I found reading this book as enjoyable as having my eyes scooped out by an paralytically drunk baboon. If you enjoy it, please take it home with my blessing. I do not want it back.”I can only advise that you never, EVER engage with it. If this means avoiding all books from now on, that's a course of action that I would wholeheartedly endorse. I was in a funk for 8 days after those twenty pages – the worst depression to hit me since I realised a year ago that our total lack of any connection meant Neil Gaiman probably wasn't my long lost brother.Beware.---* Cf Schindler's List, The Count of Monte Cristo, War of the Worlds, Bambi.
** Not strictly true, but the implications would be shocking if it were.