I hated Twilight, but that seems too easy.

I read Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero on successive train rides and fucking hated the hell out of it, but I also somehow suspect that was the desired response. Ellis reads like the jaded 1980s version of Chuck Palahniuk, where instead of peppering the books with filthy sex and scatological shockery it's cheap glittery sex and general 1980s cokey debauchery, a look-how-beautiful-and-horrible caricature that not only pandered to feelings on that decade for those who began their hangover before it ended or sought to justify their darkest suspicions, but itself came to sort of strongly influence the way we reflected on it later—until everyone just got the hell over it and chucked most of the half-true narrative. To that end, I can respect its accomplishment; as a read, it was an exhausting and monotonous slog from one gaudy set-piece filled with pointedly bland people to the next, as if to give readers time to pat their own backs and say to themselves, "How wonderful I am, that I am a real person who feels things, right?" But then I don't remember much of it, as this was so very long ago.

And while we're here, everything I've read by Palahniuk was awful, but Lullaby was probably the worst, treading as it did so perilously close to the line of supermarket check-out mass-market paperbacks in the sub-Koontz vein.