The Worst Books of 2023: Fiction!

For the second consecutive year of what will almost certainly be a hundred consecutive such years, this list was woefully easy to assemble, mainly owing to the fact that fads such as “auto-fiction” and simple gaslighting can only grow stronger every year as long as the entire mainstream US publishing market is overwhelmingly, corrosively obsessed with posturing, lecturing, and box-checking. In the year 2023 and in all foreseeable years, novels and Twitter profiles will be indistinguishable, authors will be expected to hold only correct opinions on non-literary subjects, and all novels and short stories will be first and foremost cynical productions made in sardonic mockery of literature. This is a stupid kind of writing, all these books must say on some fairly audible sub-level, the only reason I'm doing it is to give y'all a reason to applaud me on social media (and, it need hardly be added, my personal mob will be watching carefully to see that you do, unless maybe you're a bigot?). If this is the state of affairs, the besetting problems of the year's fiction will be easy to predict: they'll be slapped-together slabs of half-hearted and ham-handed plagiarism, glaringly inept and also undisguisedly contemptuous of any potential readers. And since the current publishing world welcomes this venomous crapola with open arms, there was no shortage of bad books in 2023. These were the worst of them:

10 I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)

In the distant past, even on the Worst Fiction list, a book as disorganized, half-assed, and sloppily written as this one would have attracted special notice, a kind of pained questioning on fundamental levels. Some of the other books on the list this year are simply bad, and bad books can happen, even to good authors. But books that are wrong? That's become almost a signature feature of 2023.

9 The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter (Saga Press)

After the previous entry on this list, it's almost a relief to turn to this feminist dystopia (centered around food, as all feminist writing of any kind in 2023 has been) and find it here for merely prosaic (and hence fixable) reasons: stilted, preachy writing, lazy world-building, and an existence dictated entirely by social media.

8 I Hear You’re Rich by Diane Williams (Soho)

This collection of spastic, incomplete sketches by Williams once again brings us into the territory of books that are not just bad but wrong, books that fundamentally shouldn't exist in their current state. Readers coming to this book looking for characters, dialogue, plot, pacing, or any kind of dramatic arc will not only find none of those things here, they'll also be told they're knuckle-dragging sexists for even looking in the first place.

7 Digging Stars by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (WW Norton)

The father of this book's main character studied the “indigenous astronomies” of Bantu tribes in Africa; her colleagues at the mysterious institute she joins are studying things like melanin-derived electrical superpowers, or the scientific discoveries of pre-Columbian First Nation Americans. And throughout its sappy, overwritten length, the book is just dead-eyed waiting for even one reader to state the obvious, which is that none of those things are real. But this book isn't intended as science fiction; the reality of these and other ridiculous counterfactuals is just taken as a given. This isn't fiction by meme; it's fiction by double-dog dare.

6 Death Valley by Melissa Broder (Scribner)

The only interesting thing about this embarrassing scrap-heap of a novel is the uncanny way it simulates the reading of most contemporary fiction: there's the technical ineptitude, the high school sophomore vocabulary, the scabrously insane main character you're somehow supposed to like, the hot, gritty feeling on the readers' part that they're trapped in a particularly unsuccessful therapy session. Tack on an ugly cover, a usurious cover price, and half a dozen fawning reviews, and presto! You have 99% of the 2023 fiction scene, all wrapped up in one rotten book.

5 Yellowface by RF Kuang (William Morrow)

Much like the previous entry, this book – an unshaped and unedited collection of the author's social media posts and therapy summaries, simply placed on the page and described as fiction – epitomizes a large swath of the worst qualities contemporary “auto fiction”: its endless preening and whining, its illiteracy, its scatterbrained inability to concentrate, its fundamental dishonesty.

4 Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon)

This novel, the story of prison inmates forced into brutal combat with each other for their eventual freedom, has the bones of such a good novel that its utter failure to be one more heartbreaking than irritating. Characters stubbornly remain one-dimensional; genuine drama is never drawn from cheap melodrama; and outrage is assumed rather than provoked. Instead, the thing is a showboating flop.

3 Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (The Dial Press)

Again, it's almost a relief to find a book on this list that's only here because it's earned its place the old-fashioned way, by simply being bad. The melodramatic plot here is stuffed with bland, mannered prose and ridiculous cardboard cutouts instead of actual characters, and everything is so expository that you expect footnotes and a bibliography.

2 Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

The near-universal hysterical squeals of praise lavished on this latest book from Ward are perfectly symptomatic of the rot that now pervades what Gore Vidal referred to as “the book-chat world.” The novel is an American slave story served up in great quivering blobs of purple prose, peopled by walking social studies lectures, and, it need hardly be said, simply abandoned at a random page-count rather than brought to any kind of conclusion.

1 I’m Unvaccinated and That’s OK! “Dr” Shannon Kroner (Skyhorse)

The little gold circle on the front cover of this poisonous piece of propaganda is meant to look like a Caledcott Medal, but it's not one. The “Dr” in front of Kroner's name is meant to call her a medical doctor, but she's not one. And this entire vile production – the worst of the year's fiction and the shame of its publisher – is meant to look like a bright, fun kid's book, but it's not: it's an indoctrination spear-tip for reassuring science-denying child abusers that sending their measles-riddled child to a crowded school full of other people’s children is actually good parenting instead of something that should cost them custody of their little loyalty-oaths to Donald Trump.