I love B movies, and usually, the cheesier the better
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But when it comes to books, stereotyping characters, predictable plots, implausible settings and circumstances just don’t cut it for me. I can suspend disbelief easily enough if the characters, circumstances and settings maintain some plausibility and plots are at least interesting even in the most far-out fantasies. But authors like Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress and others) just give me a rash. Writing such as Digital Fortress, which I just “gutted through,” isn’t even good enough to be “suckitudinous”—it’s just plain bad fiction, in spite of (or even more so) because of the technical proficiency Brown has with verbs, nouns, adjectives (lord, does he ever love to load on the adjectives! *blech*), etc. He apparently knows how to construct sentences that parse, he just chooses to construct sentences that are largely not worth reading.
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The neat thing about B movies, on the other hand, is that their very cheesiness can provide entertainment that cheesy books cannot. Chomping on popcorn, mocking stupid plots, ham-handed acting, poor direction, stupid continuity problems, etc., is just plain fun. Watching B movies that provide unwitting self-mockery and meta-comments on their purveyors and (if they were box-office successes) their audiences is entertainment that’s worth far more than the $1.00 rental they can usually be had for.
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But spending even half-price at a used book store for a badly-written piece of junk and wasting a couple of hours slogging through it hoping for something—anything!—better to appear is painful at best.
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BTW, I didn’t buy the Dan Brown book I just read. I can understand its appeal on one level to folks who have the intestinal fortitude to look past the stereotypical “characterization” and dumb plot because it has a remotely interesting premise. But for anyone who has the slightest (and by that I mean what some in this neck of the woods would call “teen-eint-siest”) clue about computer systems, that premise is so fatally flawed to begin with that it sinks under its own weight almost before one can even notice the book’s other HUGE flaws.
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Better to go rent a cheesy movie like the 1991 (1992?) Captain America (which I watched and thoroughly enjoyed for its flagrant B-movie-ness last week) than to read another Dan Brown—ANY Dan Brown—book.
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Another one marked off the list of authors to check out for entertainment. YMMV, of course. 🙂