Books that should have been God-awful but weren't

[13 schoolyards]

For some sad reason I've read a lot of trashy men's action paperbacks over the years - you know, they're about some one man army dude taking on the commies or the mafia or ninjas or mutants, sometimes in the future, sometimes in some urban hellhole thanks to the liberals running this country (the USA) into the ground.

I'd say 75% of the time they're all but unreadable, but that other 25% is often surprisingly decent - some of the writers really know that their job is to entertain, and the books were written at a time when they were cheap disposable entertainment so if they weren't grabbing readers early they'd go in the bin.

Sadly, there's no way to tell if one is just utterly unreadable shit spat out over a weekend by some guy on meth without actually reading it, though it usually becomes clear pretty early on (and any long running series has usually turned into crap after the first dozen or so installments anyway).

My latest pick-up - which is no joke titled HORN: HOT ZONE ("Catch this certain winner" - Don Pendleton, creator of The Executioner) but is about some kind of cyborg cop in space ("All-American Cop Hardwired For Revenge" is the cover blurb) - sadly falls into the "turgid slop" category, with too many endless boring conversations between nobodies and not enough mindless carnage or sleazy sex.

Will it put an end to my search? Probably not - for every three or four Horn's there a Gannon, which was a short-lived but absolutely insane crime series that was so over-written it was hilarious.

Has anyone else discovered that something they expected to be garbage turned out to be worth their time? I'm not so much talking about being pleasantly surprised by a novel - though that's definitely part of it - as I am those cases where you pick something up with absolutely rock-bottom expectations only to find it doesn't stink.

[Pink Gregory]

I'm sure this doesn't qualify for the thread that much but I picked up Phillip Jose Farmer's "Lord Tyger" from a chazza shop - name recognition because I liked a short story of his I read.  It's basically a gonzo trashy Tarzan story with a twist, but it's pacey as anything and for a fairly long book I was gripped. 

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I'm sure this doesn't qualify for the thread that much but I picked up Phillip Jose Farmer's "Lord Tyger" from a chazza shop - name recognition because I liked a short story of his I read.  It's basically a gonzo trashy Tarzan story with a twist, but it's pacey as anything and for a fairly long book I was gripped. 

Loved "Jesus on Mars".

[13 schoolyards]

I think Farmer (& a bunch of the other, later pulp authors) are what gave me this lifelong taste for rummaging through piles of old paperbacks looking for gold. Moorcock was another one where I had very low expectations but ended up devouring huge stretches of the eternal champion (though oddly never the Elric books).

It's not quite the same thing but I occasionally wonder if the Illuminati Trilogy is as bonkers as I remember it.

And while James Herbert was a "real" author with books in hardcover and everything, I read The Rats in a beat up paperback edition that looked like absolute garbage and it turned out to be brilliant

[Vodkafone]

In my late teens, when there were still a lot of book shops on Charing Cross Road, I used to go on periodic trawls for unusual horror books. One time I picked up an anthology of Algernon Blackwood short stories - I hadn't heard of him, it had no dust jacket, just a plain, boring cover, and the title 'Tales of Terror and Darkness' seemed very clichéd, so my expectations were low. Turns out it's really good and includes one of my favourite ever supernatural stories, The Man Whom the Trees Loved. I generally don't keep books because I don't have space, but I still have that. I think Blackwood has become more appreciated in recent years, as he should be.