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G33z3r mentioned how bad some adult authors were at writing YA in another topic. It's outside their normal zone & they failed badly, sometimes hilariously. Sometimes it's hard to believe an author even attempted it. How did it get past an editor? Do you know of any such books to avoid by otherwise good authors?

Mickey Spillane isn't known as a great author, but he's very popular for his tough guy novels such as those about Mike Hammer & Tiger Mann. I've read most of the first & was intrigued when I found a YA novel The Ship That Never Was. It was awful, as I should have expected.

Dorothy Gilman wrote a book The Tightrope Walker in which the main character grew up with a children's book that meant a lot to her. In the book, it was obviously a wonderful books.

Then she actually wrote it. The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. What a crushing disappointment.

Well, this is not too bad compared to his adult works but I found the Shatterred Sea Trilogy from Joe Abercrombie is a disappointment (only the first book is good). I rated all his First Law books 4/5 stars.

Silvana wrote: "Well, this is not too bad compared to his adult works but I found the Shatterred Sea Trilogy from Joe Abercrombie is a disappointment (only the first book is good)."

The second book of the series is by far my favourite there, because of Thorn Bathu. The other two books I found pretty average. They might be terrible YA books, I have no capability for judging how they'd read to a teen audience, but I only really liked the second one.

Thorn is alright. I think if we skip her love story then book 2 would be better. And book 3 would be much much better without the forced teenage love fest. Just because a boy and a girl meet, it does not have to have bloody romance gosh.

Silvana wrote: "Thorn is alright. I think if we skip her love story then book 2 would be better. And book 3 would be much much better without the forced teenage love fest. Just because a boy and a girl meet, it do..."

I thought the love story was cute. Kind of a clever reversal that she was the violent stabby one, and he was the heart/emotional centre.

Probably going to make some people mad here:

Roger Zelazny wrote a detective yarn called The Dead Man's Brother that was not an embarrassment, but also not up to his typical level.

Jack Vance wrote a horror novel called Bad Ronald that a lot of people like but I thought just felt unclean.

Piers Anthony took a break from his usual swill to write an autobiography so bad it drove away many of his fans. Bio of an Ogre

Robert Jordan took his fantasy soap opera approach to some Conan novels in the 80s that were a big hit because the Howard versions were out of print. But come on, Conan pondering his feelings?

Speaking of Robert E. Howard, his boxing stories are pretty hilarious.

The Dungeon series was a sequence of novels with a rotating group of authors. Philip José Farmer was the editor who was supposed to keep them on track. After two enjoyable Victorian/pulp themed installments, they brought in Charles de Lint who promptly urban-fantasied it up by introducing a sassy 20th century character who spouted a lot of slang and bickered with the hero.

@Brendan: hmm that is a common trope for me. the badass girl and the idealistic/nice boy. like Katniss and Peeta. not that I enjoy the reverse. I never read any enjoyable/endearing YA romance plot...except maybe Little Women - I still ship Jo and Laurie until now.

Phil wrote: "Probably going to make some people mad here:

Roger Zelazny wrote a detective yarn called The Dead Man's Brother that was not an embarrassment, but also not up to his t..."

Which is probably why he didn't try very hard to get it published & it only became available after he died. I agree that it wasn't up to his standards, although I liked it. He did much better with Doorways in the Sand & Today We Choose Faces which were SF-murder mysteries.

I'm not sure why you listed REH's boxing stories or were you just mentioning them because of Jordan's awful pastiche? They were very much in his normal zone. Some were serious, but most were the absurd adventures of Steve Costigan (aka Dennis Dorgan) & were similar to his Breckenridge Elkins (kind of a Pecos Bill) western character. He wrote many of both & they sold well, probably more & better than his Conan stories during his lifetime. He also wrote a lot of horror, his best work, IMO. And poetry. I don't care for it but he wrote hundreds. You can get a good look at his work at:

Jim wrote: "I'm not sure why you listed REH's boxing stories."

When REH was in the zone, his prose had that unique ferocious intensity. His boxing stories are so dramatic that I feel like I'm reading a Conan story, which is a wild juxtaposition. They're not bad, but they're intense.

Phil wrote: "When REH was in the zone, his prose had that unique ferocious intensity. His boxing stories are so dramatic that I feel like I'm read..."

Agreed, they were intense, even the funny ones were. Steve Costigan was renamed Dennis Dorgan in a couple/few stories because he sold so many & they were being published in competing magazines under pseudonyms. Fists of Iron: Round 1 is a 4 book set with all his boxing stories from the Howard Foundation. Have you read it? I haven't, but I have most of the stories in other books.

I picked up a 1$ Kindle bundle of REH stories that had some of the Steve Costigan tales in it. Lots of fun.