Cringeworthy Novels You Didn't Realize Were Written By Celebs
Have you ever read something terrible, only to realize the person who wrote it was a famous celebrity? If not, beware; that could become your reality if you happen across the self-indulgent mouth-drippings brought to you by the celebs on this list. Sometimes it's best to stick to what you're good at — even if what you're "good at" is being famous for the sake of being famous. There's no need to inflict terrible novels on the public just because you have the fame and connections to make it happen.
These celebs should probably stick to their day jobs...and stay far far away from typewriters!
Tyra Banks
Tyra Banks is a supermodel turned successful business woman and television personality. She's clearly not afraid to work to accomplish whatever she sets her mind to, and that's an admirable quality. However, we feel Banks could have kept Modelland to herself. Or maybe have buried it under her house to spare us the mind-bending agony.
The novel stars Tookie De La Crème, a girl with name we challenge you to say without laughing, as a Harry Potter-rip off and blatant stand-in for Tyra herself. While she might get away with a lackluster concept where Hogwarts is converted to a school for modeling, the writing for Modelland is beyond terrible. It's hard to believe someone was perfectly serious when they wrote, "you begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, like a push up brassiere, lift."
Although we may be sorely tempted to get a T-shirt that reads "pants are not majestic," we can honestly say that Modelland falls somewhere between being so bad it's good and being so bad...it's just bad.
Chad Michael Murray
We are already dreading Chad Michael Murray's novel American Drifter, which drops next year, if only because of the WTF-inducing explanation Murray gave for how his future magnum opus came to be. During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, Murray said his book was "inspired by a dream."
"The dream had played out so vividly, as if I was a fly on the wall watching this tale go down. Also, at that time, I had been searching for a story that would resonate with the youth of the world in a way that would make us feel the light and excitement for adventure." We'll have to wait until November 2017 to find out if Murray is destined to be this generation's Ernest Hemingway, but if you're already feeling skeptical, we don't blame you.
Kendall and Kylie Jenner
The youngest sisters in the Kardashian-Jenner clan collaborated for Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia, a dystopian novel aimed at impressionable teenage girls, and the results are about as abysmal as you might expect.
Nearly 65 percent of Amazon reviewers gave the book one star. Of course, this might be blamed on the fact that some people hate anything Kardashian-related. After all, we have it on good authority the book was actually ghost-written. It must really suck to be blamed for bad books you didn't even write. Yeah, you read that right. The famous duo (or rather their ghostwriters) put out a sequel called Time of the Twins.
Pamela Anderson
Speaking of ghost-written celebrity novels nobody asked for, Pamela Anderson actually managed to hit the best-seller list with her 2004 debut Star. However, as anyone who hates the Fifty Shades books will scream at you from the mountain tops, just because a book performs well doesn't protect it from being a steaming pile of crap. Although Pamela Anderson isn't the star (no pun intended) of her novel, as Publishers Weekly notes, "titular heroine bears more than a passing resemblance to the author herself." Publisher's Weekly was also polite in observing the material was "rather limited," which is just a nice way of saying it was mediocre at best.
At least a tell-all novel blatantly based on Anderson's life would have been a juicy read...without being a cringe-inducing insult to our intelligence.
David Duchovny
The intended message behind David Duchovny's Holy Cow was probably meant to be a PETA-inspired moral tale about how animals have feelings. In the case of Elsie Bovary, she comes right out and declares that cows can think and have feelings. Yet our bovine heroine somehow can't bring herself to call the "Box God" a TV, despite being able to conveniently comprehend a television program about industrial meat farms. Somehow, Duchovny has Elsie wind up in Jerusalem to escape the slaughterhouse rather than India, because why even make a stab at sense when you can go off on a tangent about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The truth may be out there, but this novel by David Duchovny is really out there.
Fabio
Fabio made a career out of appearing on the covers of dozens of romance novels. We can only assume he opened one at some point and thought to himself, "I can totally do that!" And so he did, which is how we got Viking. Sure the time travel romance novels are great business for some writers, like Outlander author Diana Galdabon. But then, Galdabon did her research and produced characters that were sympathetic and believable. Fabio? Not so much. His story is about a narcissistic toad who gets sent back in time and meets a love interest who bears a remarkable resemblance to his girlfriend. But unlike his girlfriend, who is evil because she wouldn't put her career on hold and pop out babies like a loving woman should, this woman has no concept of feminism or the right to vote.
If that's not ridiculous enough, we're expected to believe Fabio, er, Marco was able to convince the Vikings the foods they were eating were completely unhealthy and so was all the booze they were guzzling. Wow. Somewhere, Ivar the Boneless is rolling in his grave.
Snooki
We can't exactly say we're surprised at the content of Snooki's not-so-classic novel A Shore Thing. This is, after all, someone the New York Post claims admitted she'd only bothered reading books like Twilight, Dear John, and...well that's it. Still, it would have been nice if the former reality TV starlet had bothered to stretch for material that didn't continue to promote the trashy Jersey Shore lifestyle that's almost as much of an affront to proud Italian Americans everywhere as the insistence that the term "guidette" is anything other than an ethnic slur.
A Shore Thing contains memorable lines like, "She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face," and has a character shaking her "badonk" so hard, she releases an embarrassingly loud fart on the dance floor. Timeless. If you're willing to suspend all disbelief (and functioning brain cells) feel free to check out A Shore Thing.
The rest of us will be more than happy to let this novel follow anyone remotely associated with the Jersey Shore into the black void of irrelevancy where they belong.