I love a good bad-book. As a reader of literary fiction, it’s a nice change-of-pace to sometimes throw the towel in and succumb to the gaudy, under-written pleasures of bestselling fiction, particularly the thriller kind. I love a good Who-Dunnit, relish a bomb ass mystery, and sometimes, when the planets are aligned, I stumble onto a truly classic bestseller that sticks in the memory and changes my life forever *cough cough Gone Girl cough cough.*

https://www.instagram.com/p/BI0tSHXA8uj/?taken-by=isaiah__frost

But then, there are those books that are so bad, so underwhelming, so utterly pedestrian, that you wonder if life is even worth living when talentless hacks like the author of this hogwash can make a living churning out lifeless pieces of dog shit like this one.

I’m talking about “The Couple Next Door” by Shari Lapena, a so-called “book” that made it onto the NYT bestsellers list in 2015 despite not being the best at anything except disappointing readers with standards.

For a story about a ‘couple’, it seems odd to me that a single woman is the front cover pero that’s not my business.

I won’t even bother telling you the specifics of the story, because truth be told I don’t even remember all of the characters’ names let alone their motivations. From what I didn’t already block out from my memory, the story revolves around an idiotic couple who decides to leave their baby in the house to go to a dinner party next door. When they come back, the baby is GONE GIRL (except not really) and that’s when this book’s most ridiculous plot begins to unravel, revealing a kidnapping scheme for money, a couple into filming their infidelities that strangely only happen on their patio (?), a detective who doesn’t seem particularly good at his job, and a wife who apparently just blacks out when she’s stressed and does bad things she doesn’t remember doing because that’s totally accurate and not a damaging depiction of mental health at all.

Beyond the story, the characters are so one-dimensional, uninteresting and straight-up stupid that I not only didn’t care what happened to them, I actively imagined them going through worse things than what they went through because I hated their lack of personalities so much. The prose is so laughably bad that I’m surprised Shari Lapena isn’t 11 years old. She writes like a middle schooler who watched one too many The First 48 and thought she could be a writer. There are no convincing motivations anywhere, the set-up is cheap and the payoff is even worse, the use of mental illness in the book is downright incorrect and ridiculously harmful, and the story has no soul, no grit, no intrigue, no originality, and no depth whatsoever.

And all that could be fine, under certain circumstances; as I said, a good bad-book can be a real treat. I had the lowest of low expectations for this garbage before reading it, so the bar wasn’t even set high. And yet, it still was so unbelievably vanilla and bland that I literally almost threw my Kindle at the wall, I was so mad. This isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good sort of read; it’s a so-bad-that-it’s sad read. It’s a Lifetime novelization written by a 12-year-old. It’s a joyless, lifeless, piss-poor excuse for fiction. There’s no soul, no grit, no creativity, no flair, no entertainment, no nothing. It was a bitter pill to swallow, having spent a few days dedicated to reading this joke, but I realized that I had read the shell of a novel, and that the shell had made more money than some of the best writers ever will.

It’s offensive, to be frank, that there are so many promising young writers out here working their asses off, begging to be published, only to constantly face rejection because their projects are too ambitious, and then here’s this out-of-touch lady, whose greatest thrill probably comes when she watches Nine And a 1/2 Weeks Later, who writes a non-novel and gets applauded by critics and readers alike, with blurb lines like this:

Image result for the couple next door

If middle-school-esque prose and terribly cliched plot points are all it takes to create a “rollercoaster ride of emotions,” consider me too short to ride.

-Isaiah Rivera