Dan Brown sucks at writing, in my not-so-humble opinion. Now, because one ought to know a little bit about a man before considering his opinion, let me begin by introducing myself. According to my facebook page, my interests include: drinking, puking, reading, writing, benders, dice, chicks, being an asshole, and playing pennies canasta with my grandparents. Pleased to meet you.
I am writing this because I’ve noticed a trend over the past year or so: tons of people who don’t read books are constantly telling me and anyone else who will listen how awesome Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is, and frankly, it makes me want to choke. Sometimes I want to choke the person doing the telling, and sometimes I want to choke on my rising stomach contents. I hear this book discussed everywhere from my stepmother’s cocktail parties, to internet chat rooms, to the living rooms of my good friends, and I have been known to launch into a diatribe, similar to the one that follows, about how much Dan Brown sucks at everything.
The book jacket describes the Code as a mesmerizing thriller, engrossing mystery, etcetera. I describe it as a powerfully shitty murder-mystery littered with pseudo-academic anti-Church hype tossed in merely so that it’s palatable to people who can’t tell literature from the back of a box of Lucky Charms. Now, I am an atheist, so I don’t really care if it’s anti-Church, but when I hear some illiterate jerkass telling me that Christ was married to a prostitute, I want to neck-tackle him down the nearest flight of stairs. Or at least punt the toe of my boot square into his balls for being a gullible dipshit. You know why the same information didn’t sell in the non-fiction section? Because it’s bullshit. There are plenty of good reasons to not be Christian if that suits you, but none of them are presented in this piece of crap. Nope, it’s just a bunch of flat characters that you’ll care so little about, you won’t flinch when one switches sides without warning, which happens about 40 times in this book.
On top of all that, Dan Brown ranks with the worst writing, stylistically speaking, authors that I’ve ever had the pleasure to let fill me with murderous rage. Randomly turning to a page in the Code, I read about the rough and tumble beginnings of the main villain, Silas. Congratulations, Dan Brown: you managed to make a drunken wife-murdering and albino-patricide-via-butcher’s-knife scene bore the shit out of me! After reading that, I needed to uppercut a nearby four year old girl in the face to get the proverbial taste out of my mouth.
To make sure it wasn’t just the one book that was so terrible my rectum nearly imploded, I picked up Brown’s Digital Fortress. It might have been worse than the Code, but I couldn’t really judge at that point; I’d already told myself that I’d rather tear off my own genitals with razor wire than read through another page of this hack. The book is about 80 percent lame dialogue mixed with crushingly tiring sentences of unvarying structure. This style has been described to me by people who don’t know shit about shit as being “cinematic.” I’d bet money that if someone said that anywhere near Stanley Kubrick’s grave, he’d climb out of it and eat the guy’s family while he watched. To make an analogy, Dan Brown is the Nickleback of literature. Perhaps you’re getting the idea that I’d like to punch Dan Brown in the face. You’d be right.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’d like to suggest a few authors whom you might enjoy reading; ones that can actually craft a decent sentence. Let’s start with a man who has been described as “the most haggard friggin drunk ever,” and happens to have a Modest Mouse song named after him: Charles “Hank” Bukowski. This guy rules so hard you’ll dropkick anybody that interrupts you while you’re reading his work. In the very first sentence of Notes of a Dirty Old Man, there’s gambling, drinking, whiskey bottles being smashed over heads, classical music, Dostoevsky, and Tom Wolfe being referred to as “the worst American writer ever born.” Hilarious and heartbreaking; go read some Bukowski. He’s a non-stop cavalcade of gnar.
Ever seen American Psycho? Yeah, I know, it kind of sucked. Anyway, the author of the novel is Brett Easton Ellis, and he’s the type of guy can write three pages about driving at reasonable speeds through city traffic and make it consistently kick ass. Also, he kills hookers and homeless people in graphic detail. I suggest Ellis’ novel Glamorama for a poignant look at American culture.
If you don’t mind your narrator talking like the guys in Trainspotting, check out something by the guy who wrote it: Irvine Welsh. Reading his Marabou Stork Nightmare is pretty much just as awesome as having Amsterdam’s finest prostitutes blow lines off your hard-on (or something else that you enjoy, I guess, if you’re a lady or perhaps a square.) I’ll bet if I pulled some random kid off the Spine, he could quote at least a few lines from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but hasn’t read a word written by Hunter S. Thompson. Go look at his work, you will like it.
Chuck Palahniuk has a huge cult following and an interesting style. He wrote Fight Club, and has made over 50 people literally faint at the live readings of his new book of short fiction, Haunted, due out shortly. Not because the stories are scary, but because they make you feel physically ill. That, my friends, takes talent. Sylvia Plath also writes exceedingly well, especially if you’re into the literary diametric opposite of a chick flick. And you should be.
My point is this: these and many other authors don’t suck. Unlike Dan Brown, many can actually write a sentence just for the beauty of it, to develop characters, set the mood, or make you want to throw up. They don’t simply advance some hack plot with simple sentences and boring dialogue for a few hundred pages. It’s an embarrassment to American literature and culture that Dan Brown is a best seller. So, go pick up a good book. Chicks dig guys who can read.
-Mark Maglio hates emo and eats whiskey bottles in a dank pit somewhere in Western New York. He is currently single and has no children that he is aware of. His opinions are not shared by Generation.
