Thanks for the great response to last week’s diary! I had a lot of fun with Bad Gothics, and I hope the rest of you did, too. In particular, I’d like to give a tip of the butterfly hennin to Ninkasi23, who inflicted shared the Women Running From Houses website. There’s something so wonderfully cheesy about a Gothic cover with a girl and a light source, dashing through the woods/swamp/moors/castle/manor house/fields/open fields….
As much fun as Bad Gothics are, they’re far from the only type of Books So Bad They’re Good. Almost any type of fiction has BSBTGs, from the wildest space opera churned out for Amazing Ray-Gun Zeppelin Adventures! to deadly serious novels and short stories that end with lines like, “That night their idiot child was conceived.” That such books not only are written but are published by reputable publishers is proof positive that no type of fiction is immune to being memorably terrible, not to mention terribly memorable.
And it’s not just fiction. Bad history, bad biography, bad science (especially bad science), bad psychology, bad medicine…the list of hilariously awful non-fiction, some deservedly obscure, some undeservedly best sellers, is long and sordid. Here are a couple that have stuck with me through the years, bringing joy, exasperation, and the peculiar pleasure that comes only when one reads a Book So Bad It’s Good.
The first really Bad piece of non-fiction I ever read was Chariots of the Gods? when I was 12 or 13. I’d always loved history and archaeology (blame the family subscription to National Geographic, especially the series on the great temples at Abu Simbel in Egypt being moved to another site to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser), and this was juicy stuff – space aliens had come to earth, bred with earth women, and built all sorts of cool buildings! My parents, showing amazing tolerance, let me read Erich von Daniken’s breathless pages until my copy nearly fell apart. And for about half a year, I was thoroughly convinced that it was all true.
Then I started reading Isaac Asimov and realized that it was all bunk. Plausible, romantic, and a lot of fun, but still bunk. I haven’t touched any of von Daniken’s works in years, but I still find myself smiling, just a little, when I find a battered copy of Gold of the Gods at a tag sale.
Of course, Erich von Daniken isn’t the only author to write a plausible, entertaining, and totally ridiculous book. Bad Non-Fiction has a long and distinguished history in American letters. Far from it:
Lawsonomy, by Alfred Lawson. Lawson was a true American original: he was, at various times, a professional baseball player, a pioneer aviator, an economist, an educator, and a philosopher who founded his own religion. He was also, and eternally, a world class crank. Athletic and handsome, Lawson played for the old Boston Braves and tried to start an airline delivery service in the early 1920s. When that failed, he turned to science and quickly “discovered” that Newtonian physics were all wrong. The universe according to Lawsonomy was based not on relativity or even Newtonian physics, but on the great principles of Suction, Pressure, and Zig-Zag-And-Swirl. His books, almost all of which included a photograph of Lawson riding the cowcatcher of a steam locomotive as an alleged experiment in wind resistance, branched out into medicine (did you know that disease is caused by menorgs and cured by disorgs? Well, why not, for pity’s sake?) and finance (Direct Credits instead of banks will cure all of society’s financial ills, especially “helpless old folks”!).
For all that Lawson’s work was complete bunk, it was surprisingly popular for a couple of decades in the early to mid 20th century. Direct Credits, which advocated replacing banks with the federal government, gained a huge following during the Depression, when the economy was such a mess that weird economic cults sprang up everywhere. The late, great philosopher and polymath Martin Gardner even found a poem written by a Direct Credits true believer that called Lawson “God’s great eternal gift to man,” and how many eccentrics can say the same?
Lawson later founded a university to train America’s best young minds to become Knowledgians, thoroughly versed in Lawsonomy, Zig-Zag-And-Swirl, and Direct Credits instead of the false doctrines of Newton, traditional medicine, and conventional banking and economics. He himself passed from this vale of tears many years ago, but anyone wishing to follow in his august footsteps can learn more at the website founded to carry on his great work. No word on if they’re still accepting students, or if anyone has tried to revive Direct Credits, but his works are on line for all to read….
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. This is one of the best written, smoothest, silliest books I’ve ever had the dubious privilege of reading. Based on a TV show about the “secret of Rennes-les-Chateau,” this book launched an entire industry of historico/religious speculation, pumped millions of dollars into the old Cathar areas of France, and paved the way for one of the best selling novels of the early 21st century.
HBHG’s thesis is simple: while restoring his church, a priest named Berenger Sauniere discovered a scandalous secret that made him rich. The secret involved a mysterious society, the Prieure de Sion, that branched off from the Knights Templar in the Middle Ages and later came to include some of the greatest creative minds in Western History, including Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Debussy, Victor Hugo, and Jean Cocteau. The remnants of the Prieure supposedly existed to this day, guarding the precious “holy grail” (the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene) against the day when European democracy failed and a Merovingian could arise from obscurity to lead the West again. Coded parchments, inexplicable deaths, the Templars, famous names, persecuted Cathars, a terrified Catholic Church – this one had it all.
And on the surface, it seemed plausible enough, primarily because the authors did a very good job of laying out their outrageous story without it sounding completely absurd. The bibliography has some excellent if outdated sources, and who doesn’t like the idea of a secret society bravely keeping a Great Secret Until the Time is Ripe? This is the stuff of epics, and the storm of outrage that greeted HBHG from religious scholars, medievalists, and the Sinclair family (supposedly descended from Jesus, no less!) only made the book more plausible, not less.
Of course, it’s bogus from beginning to end. Sauniere made his money selling Masses by mail order. The Prieure of Sion was the creation of a cranky reactionary named Pierre Plantard who had set himself up as a Merovingian pretender. The Cathars and Templars weren’t involved. There was no big secret, and the "dossiers secret" that told the tale were forgeries. But that hasn’t stopped writers as different as Dan Brown and Graham Hancock, filmmakers as diverse as Ron Howard and the Disney factory, and countless tour guides and conspiracy theorists from latching onto the idea that Jesus was a Merovingian (?), and that this knowledge could bring down bring down the Catholic Church (!) And it isn’t it fun to speculate that maybe, just maybe, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a little more than friends?
There are literally hundreds of other great crank classics, from Ellen; or, The Whisperings of an Old Pine (a Socratic dialogue between a girl and a pine tree that explains why science has it all wrong) to Worlds in Collision (Venus was a comet whose tail produced hydrocarbons called manna to feed the Israelites) to Chariots of the Gods? (numerous ancient monuments, all curiously associated with non-white cultures, were actually produced by prehistoric space travelers) to Bloodline of the Holy Grail (a genealogist “proves” that Merovingian Jesus is the ancestor of the Royal Stewarts, one of whom has just now proclaimed himself the true king of England)…it goes on and on. The writer who manages to tie Jesus, space aliens, buried treasure, a lost civilization, dinosaurs, and Direct Credits into a single Unified Field Theory is guaranteed to make a ton of money, or at least amuse the heck of whomever operates the typesetting computer.
So, fellow Kossacks – what about it? Surely I’m not the only one who loves Bad Non-Fiction! What are your favorites?