The Worst Book I Ever Read

The worst book I ever read was Ritual by Gra­ham Mas­ter­ton. I was told to read it by a boy­friend when I was 17 and was there­fore impres­sion­able, so that when he said it was the best book ever I ignored the tacky pic­ture on the front of it and thought “why not?”.

I was also prob­ably wor­ried that if i didn’t read it he wouldn’t like me any­more and being a dumb teen­ager didn’t real­ise that any­one who doesn’t like you just because you don’t like a book is prob­ably a twat.

So I sat down to read Ritual.

To this day I sin­cerely wish I hadn’t.

There are many things wrong it. Many, many things which have stuck with me these last 8 years and which do not bare repeat­ing even for the pur­poses of this review. I wouldn’t say it had per­man­ently scarred me because being hon­est, it wasn’t really inter­est­ing enough to do that, but it def­in­itely left an impression.

Firstly let’s start off by say­ing the premise of this book is that a can­ni­bal cult ambi­tiously decides it’s going to bring about the second com­ing of Christ by eat­ing the hell out of each other.

Into this gap­ing black hole of plot falls Charlie McLean a major dick­bag and res­taur­ant critic who much later in the story has to eat his own fin­ger and his son Mar­tin who hates Charlie almost as much as I do.

Charlie finds out about an exclus­ive din­ing club and boor­ishly tries to gain entry to it. Obvi­ously the exclus­ive din­ing club is a local divi­sion of the afore­men­tioned can­ni­bal cult, or Celestines as they call them­selves, which man­ages to kid­nap Mar­tin. This is mostly because like I said, Charlie is a massive dickbag.

The rest of the book is a very long stu­pid story involving more can­ni­bal­ism than any­one really cares about, Charlie try­ing to get his son back des­pite the fact that his son hates him, a killer dwarf assas­sin who isn’t actu­ally a dwarf but is instead a man who has eaten his own feet, shins, hands and fore­arms but some­how still man­ages to wield a machete and dis­em­bowel numer­ous people in an artistic show of pluck and determ­in­a­tion in the face of dis­ab­il­ity, what I seem to remem­ber as the unironic use of the phrase ‘fiery wimple’ and a cameo appear­ance from Baron Samedi.

It’s all very bad. In fact it’s bad so it should come with a health warn­ing: CAREFUL THIS BOOK IS SO TERRIBLE IT WILL MAKE YOU VOMIT UP YOUR SPLEEN. Unfor­tu­nately the closest it comes to describ­ing it’s own awful­ness is this excerpt from the second last chapter:

Charlie turned around. He saw M. Musette, thigh-deep in regur­git­ated tis­sue, still end­lessly vomit­ing one thou­sand times one thou­sand. He saw Mme Musette, with her wimple alight, rigid with hys­teria and fear.

And so it’s my job to tell you that really, hon­estly, Ritual by Gra­ham Mas­ter­ton is the worst book ever com­posed on earth if not the entire galaxy.

Stay away from it. For the love of God.