Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
This week I read a book to which I had a very bad reaction. It left me so disturbed that I had to sit down and write notes before I could relax enough to go to sleep. And even now, nearly four days later, I can’t quite rid myself of the creepy feelings.
To be fair, this was never going to be a good week. For all sorts of reasons, I was caught in a net of failure, guilt and poor concentration.
Not propitious circumstances in which to read a new book, I accept, particularly one by an author new to me. So keep that in mind when I say that this author gave me the horrors.
And not for the usual reasons – too violent, nasty porn, terrible apostrophe awareness – you know, the big ones.
Here’s what happened.
Download for the Journey
Midweek I had to go to a sad occasion. Not wanting to think about what I was leaving undone or going towards, I bought, pretty much at random, a novel to distract me on the journey.
It had a good title, clear and somewhat intriguing. I downloaded a sample. Workmanlike narrative, set in wartime East Anglia. That should do it. I bought it and put the Kindle in my bag for the train.
But almost as soon as I started reading, I began to feel uncomfortable. I mean, literally, physically uncomfortable. I kept shifting in my seat; losing my place; wanting to get up and do something else. It felt almost as if I were being watched. But I wasn’t. (I checked. Several times.)
Each time I looked up, it was an effort to go back and pick up the story again. I just didn’t want to.
Over the course of the day I read most of it. In the evening, though I didn’t really care about the characters or anything that happened to them, I sat and finished it. It felt like homework.
Not that finish is quite the right word. I got to the end of the text and stopped. Which is exactly what the author did. There was no tension or climax. No resolution.
By that time, I was not only creeped out, I was pissed off. Those notes I mentioned? Bit irritable.
Day 2 Thoughts
The characters that should have been sympathetic always seem distant. Sometimes performed feelings for the reader. Everyone sounded the same, regardless of age or class.
The plot was repetitive. One problem, one dimension. Hollow. It didn’t develop, just repeated the same issue.
There was much dialogue, especially between the hero and heroine. Initially clipped and rather attractive, as the book continued their exchanges became not only repetitive but nonsensical and sometimes incomprehensible. It was strangely set out, too, with a line space between what a character did and what he said, which added to the confusion as to who was speaking, since “X said” was used infrequently. Mostly it was impossible to tell from the content which character was speaking. I found myself having to count down from the last time a speaker was definitely identified to work out who said what. This showed all too clearly how they spoke in an identical voice (as did the narrator and all the minor characters). Basically this was monotone.
There were also lots of one-sentence paragraphs which sounded portentous for no reason and got tiresome. Also no humour, except a bit of slapstick.
Conclusion? ROBOTIC
Day 3
In the morning, I wasn’t proud of myself. The book seemed to be self-published. Under the auspices of the Romantic Novelists’ Association I used to try to help new writers with their craft. Surely these were habits I had seen before and not freaked out over?
In several novels, Jeffrey Archer had me counting A’s and B’s turns in dialogue. And Barbara Cartland was the mistress of the one-sentence paragraph in her later works.
Ah, but there was that word. Robotic. Neither Archer nor Cartland could ever be called robotic. Mannered, certainly. Eccentric, often. Mad as a box of frogs possibly. Robotic? Nah.
Could it be that the author was not quite human?
That monotone delivery! That lack of humour! I always remember Marilla in Anne of Green Gables thinking that a sense of humour is “another way of saying a sense of the fitness of things.” Yes, that was what was missing.
I started digging.
The Author
The only author bio I could find was on Amazon. It is 3 paragraphs of not very different ways of saying the same thing about their writing. Well, at least they are consistent.
Here is one: “writes emotionally addictive romance about unexpected connections, undeniable chemistry, and the kind of love that rarely arrives according to plan.”
If you click on any word in the bio you are invited to “Ask Rufus”.
Rufus, it turns out, is Amazon’s AI shopping assistant portal. Could Rufus be writing at night, like I used to when I had a day job?
And then there are the statistics.
This pen name published its/their first novel on 21st May 2026, followed by 4 more that same month. The total so far, at least on the day that I looked, was 23. The books seem to be all romance, some WW2, some contemporary small town, some teenage, including just pre-teen in the recommended reading age. Some of the earliest titles look like fantasy.
Even Barbara Cartland, Guinness Book of Records’ most productive author, only managed 29 novels in one 12-month period. 1968 or 69, I think it was. That’s one book every 12.6 days. Our Author seems to have halved Cartland’s days per book.
AI
I always tried to steer clear of AI, even when everyone was saying it was magic.
(Anthropic downloaded every single title I ever published with Harlequin Mills and Boom and did it “for training purposes”. Not that I’m bitter. I am SO not alone.)
AI’s main effect, if not purpose, seems to be to deskill the rest of us. This, of course, will further concentrate the world’s resources into fewer and fewer hands.
So I wonder whether my recoil (it is the only word for it) from this book was actually my subconscious broadcasting a Danger warning.
It is true that the only time I have felt this prolonged sense of unease and helplessness was after a highly plausible would-be fraudster tried to convince me he worked for my bank’s security department.
There was a horrible hollowness about him, too. And the same awful sense of being manipulated deliberately and not for my good.
CONCLUSION
But then, again, maybe this is just me making a mountain out of a molehill. What do you think?
Sophie
I think your judgement is sound, Sophie.
THank you, Liz.
I agree with Liz, Sophie. In some ways, I’m surprised you finished it. There’s a lot to be said for trusting your gut instincts. As you have here.
I suppose the crunch question is whether you’ve left a review or a report on Amazon suggesting that the book was AI-written. Amazon requires authors to state whether or not AI was used. Did this author answer truthfully, one wonders? And what would Amazon do to authors who lied about using AI? I am reminded that Amazon came down like a ton of bricks on me for “plagiarising” my own work.
Thank you, Joanna. I thought about the point quite hard and have left a brief review (one star for the first time in my life) and asked whether it is AI.
To my surprise Amazon has sent me an acknowledgement saying thank you, “your latest customer review is live on Amazon. We and millions of shoppers on Amazon appreciate the time that you took to share your experience with this item.” Can’t remember getting one of those before.
I think that’s a standard Amazon response. I’ve certainly had it more than once. I was thinking more of a report than a review, though I did mention reviews. On the book page on Amazon, immediately under the blurb, there’s a button “Report an issue with this product”. It might have more impact to use that to say something like “I suspect this book was written by AI”. But your choice whether you do that or not.
I would trust the gut feel of a experienced writer like yourself any day, Sophie. Only this morning read and reposted a quote from Eve Fairbanks, author and editor: “No matter how much we may tell ourselves that AI is just a tool like spell-check, it isn’t. When we use AI to flesh our ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking.” Robotic sums it up perfectly.
I hate the idea of hurting someone’s feelings just because I didn’t enjoy a story, Sarah. But this really did upset me. And I did take Joanna’s thoroughly justifiable point and have now left a review.
Irritating in the extreme. I suggest that you return the book and get your money back.
You made me laugh, Maggi. The problem is I did read it. I don’t take books back to Waterstones because I hated them when I’d finished.
I’m consideriing whether I should follow Joanna’s suggestion. I don’t have the technical tools (or the time, to be honest) to confirm my strong suspicion of AI involvement.
I think Maggi’s suggestion is perfectly reasonable, Sophie. It’s not like buying a physical book from Waterstones. If you bought a book thinking it was written by a human being and have very good reasons for believing it was written by a machine, you have every right to ask for your money back.