The Worst Book Ever Is ‘What Are These Strawberries Doing on My Nipples? … I Need Them for the Fruit Salad!’

By Gabe Habash

Oh, dear friends, it’s been a while since we last entered these hallowed halls of plunging mediocrity. So long that there is dust on How To Avoid Huge Ships. Cobwebs on Dildo Cay. Mold on Microwave for One. Some other sign of disuse on Moon People. But back into the Worst Book Ever Castle we must go, because there is a new book to add to the gallery. We must do our duty and place it where it belongs, for the circle must be closed.

What Are These Strawberries Doing on My Nipples? … I Need Them for the Fruit Salad! isn’t just notable because it has both an exclamation point and a question mark in it–what you’ll discover upon digging deeper within it is a tale of vast sadness and infinite strangeness.

It all begins with Vanessa Feltz, the book’s author and owner of one of the oddest Wikipedia pages you’ll ever see.

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The Worst Book Ever is ‘Moon People’

This is a book

By Gabe Habash

“Moon People has reshaped my literary perceptions.” – Goodreads reviewer Neil

What I’m going to do before telling you about the epic stinker Moon People by Dale M. Courtney is issue a blanket sic statement for the duration of this article. I think that’s important to say before we move forward. Anyway, this is how chapter one of Moon People by Dale M. Courtney opens (source):

This story begins on a Beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida With a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old Single man that works at the local High school as a science teacher and astrology in the 12-grade level. Now he’s been here about 5 years and has become kind of partial to a young lady by the name of Cheral Baskel a local restaurant owner in Daytona Beach. At the moment Cheral’s preparing her restaurant for another Shuttle launch at the cape and everyone always gathers at her place because you can see the launch real good at her place. It’s also on the water and its real close to the cape and she really decks the place out.

You probably have questions. That’s understandable. The wonder of Moon People is so great, its folly so staggering, that it jams a reader’s ordinary thought process onto a weird separate track that the brain was never meant to use (also sometimes called an “aneurysm”). It’s only through a careful construction of its pieces that we begin to understand the magnitude of what Courtney has created.

And that’s what makes Moon People worse than previous claimants to the Worst Book Ever crown (How to Avoid Huge Ships, Dildo Cay, Microwave for One)–its terribleness extends the way a far-reaching, deep-down conspiracy reaches.

So, let’s start at the beginning. and work our way down the rabbit hole. This is the big kahuna.

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The Worst Book Ever is ‘Microwave for One’

Microwave for One

By Gabe Habash

Before you get all riled up about how we’ve previously called two other books (How to Avoid Huge Ships and Dildo Cay) the Worst Book Ever, you should know that sometimes PWxyz makes mistakes. Please forgive us our mis-pronouncement and come, walk with us down the hallowed halls of literary infamy, for we have a whopper of a book to show you.

In 1987, The Book Services Ltd published a slim, 144-page cookbook called Microwave for One. The book is by Sonia Allison, who has quite a few publications under her belt. But she’s best known for her masterpiece of tragedy, a book whose title and cover is so rife with sadness that one almost has the urge to brush the invisible tears from Ms. Allison’s face as she leans over her microwave and her food spread.

Very little is known about the contents of the book, except for the few that have been lucky enough to chance upon a copy.

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The Worst Book Ever is ‘Dildo Cay’

By Gabe Habash

We know what you’re thinking: there are a lot of books out there, how could you possibly name one book the worst of all? And besides, we already picked The Worst Book Ever back in July, the masterpiece known as How to Avoid Huge Ships. But grant us a do-over on that declaration, because, boy, do we have a doozy for you today.

Dildo Cay is a book written by Nelson Hayes in 1940 and published by Houghton Mifflin and it’s also called Dildo Cay. Just wanted to stress that part. The cover of the book is pictured above, and its centerpiece, a far-off vertical shaft on the cay, does ridiculously little to dispel its unfortunate title.

The title is a reference to a cay (or “key”) covered with Dildo cactus, and yes, Dildo cactus are real and yes, there is a real place called Dildo Cay. Here’s a map. In the top left corner, if you squint, you can see it. It’s not that big.

And all that would be bad enough, but, as it turns out, Dildo Cay is actually a really bad book.

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