Good lessons from a bad novel

I hated this book but there's a takeaway.

Like I said on YouTube earlier today, I read a book that really sucked, despite sounding cool and having a good premise. The characters were dumb, I was rooting for the monster, and the “purple prose” was excruciating.

The book was BIGFOOT HUNTERS by Rick Gualtieri. It came out in 2012 on Smashwords, and I guess he’s had some success because there are audiobooks and sequels. But yeah. I had a terrible time with this one. It was overwritten, by a lot, and I found the characters highly unlikable. My main takeaway was that the scenes written from Bigfoot’s point of view were 1) very similar to how I’m writing an evil monster in my current manuscript, and 2) awful, so clearly I need to change something there.

Even if I didn’t like the book, it at least put me on track to fix something in my own work. So that’s cool. Good luck with the others, Gualtieri. KRAKEN HUNTERS sounds like a cool sequel. I’m interested. Just not right now.