shanmonster | I'm Not Sure I Can Make It

Every now and then, I like to read a truly awful book. I find it helps me appreciate the good literature I favour all the more. Last night, I started reading Zach Hughes' Seed of the Gods. This book is astonishingly bad.

Have you heard of Erich Von Daniken's highly successful and very silly Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past? It's actually unfair of me to say this book is very silly, since I've never actually read it, but I have read enough about it to get the gist. In any case, Zach Hughes was inspired by this book, so much so that he sets Seed of the Gods in Von Daniken's universe.

But it really doesn't matter what universe it was set in. Bad writing is bad writing, and this book deserves the MST3K treatment. Check out the following outtakes:

Bud was an easy smiler with a handsome handlebar mustache, bushy eyebrows. He was better looking, she thought, than Elliot Gould and, although not quite as groovy, even more handsome than George Peppard. As she approached him she felt that vast, surging love sweep through her body with a force which caused her step to falter as her mind overflowed with a confusion of nice thoughts: young puppies and clean babies in blue bassinets and rooms with thick red carpets and cozy fireplaces and the smell of broiled steak and baby formula.

Later, we meet up with what appears to be the captain of a flying saucer. Her name is Cele.

She was a woman in a woman's world and one of woman's prerogatives is to be capricious in small matters. A delightful unpredictability was one of the small traits which went into making women superior.

The other small trait is a shapely anything, and luckily for Cele, everything about her is shapely. She often has more than one well-shaped body part in just one page's worth of writing. And if it's not clearly defined as shapely, it's mature:

She reached out a shapely arm and picked up the report left by the rating. It was a confirmation of the latest arrival, without detection or incident, at the planetary base. She sighed. Her mature, firm breast rose and fell under her officer's green blouse.

I don't think I'm going to be able make it all the way through this book. It's too scary.