The worst writing I have ever read.

(And I write that as someone who has suffered through multiple readings of the Eye of Argon.)

A sample:

Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon. It was the color of a leopard’s tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay and chestnut. Her hair was a helmet, a hood, the cowl of the monk, magician or cobra.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds’ shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips.

You really have to read it out loud to appreciate just how mind-numbingly awful it is. I found, when reading it to myself, that my subconscious brain just started skimming over things. It was only when I started reading it out loud that the Cthulhuian mind-rending began.

This is taken, by the way, from a published novel: Silk and Steel by Ron Miller.

I’m also fairly enamored of this pictorial rendition of the subject of the passage (although you really need to click through and read the full thing to appreciate it fully).

This has been making the rounds for a couple of months now, so I’m probably not the first person to note the similarity between this misbegotten narrative excess and the Song of Solomon. I suspect this is not merely an accidental resemblance: One of the characters, you’ll note, is named Spikenard. While many reading the passage dismiss this as merely some horrible fantasy name, Spikenard is actually the name of a flower which is mentioned twice in the Song of Solomon.

By pure synchronicity, a couple of days after reading this for the first time, I was reading 3:16 – Bible Text Illuminated by Donald E. Knuth, which expanded insightfully on the topic while discussing the Song of Solomon (pg. 96):

These songlets are examples of an ancient type of love poem called a wa?f, in which a beloved’s body is praised part by part, often making use of extravagant and far-fetched metaphors. For example, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1250 B.C. contains a fragment of a wa?f that says, “my sister’s mouth is a lotus; her breasts are mandrakes”. Wa?f songs appear several times in the Thousand and One Nights, and they are still popular in modern Arab poetry. A 19th-century wa?f includes the line: “Her bosom is like polished marble tablets, as ships bring them to Sidon; like pomegranates topped with piles of glittering jewels.”

So there is clearly a very specific effect that Ron Miller is going for. Does this make it better? Not really. I’d even argue it makes it worse. Miller has clearly put a lot of thought and care into rendering something that, in its actual execution, ends up being a mockery of the very thing it sought to create.

Understanding what Miller was attempting to create helps us to understand where it all went horribly, horribly wrong. But the skidmarks don’t negate the car crash.

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