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Authors who wrote a few things you like; the others, not so much?

Elizabeth I

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Elizabeth I
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Since we seem to be on a book roll here, are there any authors who have written a few things you really like, but when you try their other works you don't like them?

Some of mine are:

Dodie Smith - loved I Capture the Castle, couldn't stand anything else she wrote

E.F. Benson - love the Lucia series (I re-read it regularly), barely made it through the one other of his books I tried

Piers Anthony - liked the early Xanth books, hated the later ones and his other series

David Eddings - liked The Belgariad up through Enchanter's End Game, think the rest of his stuff is just re-writing The Belgariad over and over.
 
Elizabeth I said:
Piers Anthony - liked the early Xanth books, hated the later ones and his other series

David Eddings - liked The Belgariad up through Enchanter's End Game, think the rest of his stuff is just re-writing The Belgariad over and over.
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Agreed.

Michael Moorcock- some of his Eternal Champion stuff is good, stuff like the Dancers at the End of Time is horrible (along with a number of books whose names I have driven out of my memory- specifically the Fireclown books).

Tolkien. The stuff he published was fantastic. The nth book published after his death, pieced together by his son from scraps of paper found in JRRT's trash bin...not so much.
 
Roddy Doyle - I loved The Barrytown Trilogy. I also loved his nonfiction book about his parents, Rory and Ida. But The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was a far more serious novel, and I couldn't stomach it. Having said that, the reason was purely the subject matter, not his writing style or something like that.
 
John Irving. Liked almost all of his early stuff, not so much the later.

I read The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp numerous times.
 
Arturo Pérez-Reverte. I enjoyed The Fencing Master as a study of the grotesque. His other books, not so much. The Club Dumas, for example? Totally worthless.

Tom Clancy. Like a lot of authors, he seemed to start out strong and get gradually hackier with each successive novel.

Stephen King, post Dark Tower, is dead to me.

William Gibson seemed to pretty much phone it in on his latest, Spook Country, which seemed to settle for being merely a political rant. I think he's been steadily declining since his early work, and I don't hold out much hope for his next novel.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and Baudolino I thought were very accessible. The Island of the Day Before, not so much. My sister won't even go as far as Baudolino.

Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth: The former with The Bourne Identity, and the latter with The Fourth Protocol and The Day of the Jackal, are examples of authors who had one or two novels that are really excellent, plus shelves of ignorable hackery.

George Lucas. He's a movie maker, not a novelist, but I think you know what I mean.

And while we're on the audio-visual arts, Aaron Sorkin. Sports Night was inspired. The West Wing was, for the most part, quality television programming. And then came Studio 60. Am I wrong for preferring 30 Rock? I think not.
 
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L Ron Hubbard. I love some of his sci fi stuff, especially, "Battlefield Earth", (skip the movie, read the book), one of my all time favorite sci fi books. The stuff that is garbage... I don't think I need to list.

And Stephen King has a broad range of hits and misses.
 
I liked Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant, despite it having no ending, and the Incarnations of Immortality as well. Xanth was entertaining at first, but then just became an excuse to showcase reader-suggested puns.
 
Dorian Gray said:
I liked Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant, despite it having no ending, and the Incarnations of Immortality as well. Xanth was entertaining at first, but then just became an excuse to showcase reader-suggested puns.
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I only liked about half of his Incarnations of Immortality (his habit of ending them with an 80-page essay on how he's been lately was really sickening. Especially the one where he is shocked to find that his daughter and her friends are sleeping with their boyfriends at college. Despite the fact that, in half his books, his 15-year-old female characters can't wait to seduce the 40-year-old men). The Shade of the Tree stunk, and the Planet of Tarot trilogy was worse.
 
Patricia Cornwell - her first 6 or so books were really solid and the science spot on and then they descended rapidly into absolute drivel where the same storyline just repeated itself in every book with increasingly stupid situations.

Kathy Reichs - again great science and good solid plot in the first couple of books and then the same damn storyline repeated over and over.
 
I know I mentioned this in the "Epic Fantasy" thread, but I loved the 5 Corwin books in Roger Zelazny's Amber series and the 5 Merlin books were meh. I still have no idea why I made myself finish them.
 
Michael Crichton. It went downhill from 'Andromeda Strain'. And its accelerating more and more...
 
Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is one of my most favorite books, but I have not been able to get through a single one of the others.

Except for The Crying of Lot 49, which was more of a novella.
 
Riayn said:
Patricia Cornwell - her first 6 or so books were really solid and the science spot on and then they descended rapidly into absolute drivel where the same storyline just repeated itself in every book with increasingly stupid situations.

Kathy Reichs - again great science and good solid plot in the first couple of books and then the same damn storyline repeated over and over.
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Totally agree. Two authors that I have actually stopped reading because I got so hacked off with their descent into mediocrity (and that's a generous description)
 
Madalch said:
Michael Moorcock- some of his Eternal Champion stuff is good, stuff like the Dancers at the End of Time is horrible (along with a number of books whose names I have driven out of my memory- specifically the Fireclown books).
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And Gloriana. Horrible tripe.
 
Madalch said:
Madalch said:
Michael Moorcock- some of his Eternal Champion stuff is good, stuff like the Dancers at the End of Time is horrible (along with a number of books whose names I have driven out of my memory- specifically the Fireclown books).
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And Gloriana. Horrible tripe.
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How about the Jerry Cornelius stuff? I remember liking it when I was ~13, but I suspect it was crap.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
How about the Jerry Cornelius stuff? I remember liking it when I was ~13, but I suspect it was crap.
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Never even tried to read that. Somehow an interstellar assassin didn't capture my imagination the same way an albino emperor with a demonic sword did.

Even when I was fourteen.
 
Hokulele said:
I know I mentioned this in the "Epic Fantasy" thread, but I loved the 5 Corwin books in Roger Zelazny's Amber series and the 5 Merlin books were meh. I still have no idea why I made myself finish them.
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The Second Amber series was a huge letdown. A lot of what made Amber fresh in the first series had degenerated into tired Shtick in the second.
 
My list includes:

John Irving...liked Garp, other stuff, not so much.
John Greshem...they all blur together in my mind, but liked the Firm.
Stephen King...plowed my way through the Shinning, haven't been able to lift another volume since.
Dostoyefsky -- meh.
solzhenitsyn -- the Gulag was very moving, everything else feels like writing you "should" be reading but don't expect to enjoy it...sort of like cauliflower.
gabriel garcia marquez -- after 100 Years of Solitude...every book felt like 100 years. Gives "magical realism" a bad name.
William Gibson -- never could get into any others after the first.
Melville....More than one dead whale in that pile of books.
Hemmingway...can't figure out why he's so beloved.
 
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