An easy target but it may amuse some of you: Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Author Dan Brown . The critics (this is Brown thinking)
said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description , thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.
See also The Eight Worst Sentences in Dan Brown’s Inferno . For example:
Chapter 5: Emerging from the darkness, a scene began to take shape . . . the interior of a cave . . . or a giant chamber of some sort. The floor of the cavern was water, like an underground lake.
A giant chamber – perhaps like a cave! And a giant cave with a watery floor – why, you’re right, that is like an underground lake. Uncannily so, in fact.
And:
Chapter 6: As Langdon stared into his own weary eyes, he half wondered if he might at any moment wake up in his reading chair at home, clutching an empty martini glass and a copy of Dead Souls, only to remind himself that Bombay Sapphire and Gogol should never be mixed.
I have no idea what is going on here. I think it might be a joke of some sort. But we can be reassured that Dan Brown knows who Gogol is.
You may also enjoy Christopher Bailey’s Secret Sequel , an “Exclusive Look at Dan Brown’s Next Blockbuster Novel.” And this one of his (nothing to do with Dan Brown) is a classic: The Church of Moloch (Reformed) .
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