< Narm

Narm/Literature

"One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter."
—Oscar Wilde, mocking Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop
"[The Deerslayer's] pathos is funny.
—Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

It's harder to see a Narm moment when reading a book, but you'll know it when it hits you.

Oh, hurrah! Good old Puddleglum!

    • The reason Puddleglum has that moment also qualifies. The Green Witch was attempting to make the characters forget that the surface is real. This involves her asking for every magnificent surface concept, "Please, what is this [insert concept here]?" Over and over and over.
      • YMMV, of course. That scene always freaked me out as a kid, still gives me the shivers today, and several of my friends agree.
    • The BBC radio adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, And the Wardrobe was generally a rather good adaptation for the new medium, with solid voice acting and plenty of original lines. However, it does include a ham-tastic line from Jadis:

The White Witch: We shall kill the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, and their pet lion Aslan, and re-establish my rule...in NARNIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

  • Jacqueline Carey is a great writer. But, in the beginning of her book Banewreaker, right in the middle of her description of the mythic beginnings of the world, is this:

"Also there were dragons."

  • RA Salvatore: "You deserve the wrath of Pook!" If you think that line is hilarious now, wait till you realize it comes out of Artemis Entreri's mouth. That's right, the supposedly coldest and most repressed assassin of the series once went around screaming a name one letter away from Garfield's teddy bear. Uh, Salvatore, we love your fight scenes, but what is up with your dialogue?
    • Yeah, yeah, we know, Pook is a dangerous guy; but come on! He's almost Garfield's teddy bear!
    • Even better, in Exile (book two of the Dark Elf trilogy):

"Who are you? You are not my father!"
"No. I am your... mother!"

  • "Sucks to your ass-mar!" from Lord of the Flies.
    • A bunch of boys naked on an island saying things like "sucks to your ass-mar". What do you mean, it's not homoerotic?
  • From The Lord of the Rings:

"Praise them with great praise!"

  • The epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows received derision for being cheesy, overly sappy, or like a bad Fanfic, despite the author's presumed sincerity in the final scene of her long-running series.
    • JKR often overdoes it with Snape's various Awesome Moments. Remember "I, THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE?" or "Look... at... me..."
    • Harry's tantrum in Dumbledore's office was a strange variant of this trope. Over-the-top and horribly melodramatic and immature and hilarious on re-reads, when the reader's shock had worn off? Yes. But then you realize all the melodrama is in Harry's behavior, meaning that he's so heartbroken he can't even stop himself from acting embarrassingly.
    • "Snape!" ejaculated Slughorn.
    • The death of Dumbledore at the end of Half-Blood Prince, meant to be serious and heartbreaking, was seen by some as overdone and melodramatic.
      • Not so much the death as the funeral. Not anything specific, just the over-the-top way it was written.
    • There's also a line in Order of the Phoenix.

"WAIT UNTIL WE'VE GOT THE PROPHECY!" bawled [Lucius] Malfoy.

    • It gives you the image of a grown man wailing like a toddler.
    • Then, of course, there's the sentence in Deathly Hallows: "Death was with them like a presence." Not only is it tautologous (death was with them like something that was with them),

it's also used to describe the death of a minor character who we mainly know from when he was being impersonated by a psychotic Death Eater. Moody was cool, but he really hadn't earned the amount of drama JKR was trying to put in that sentence.

    • This troper will cite the same defence against that argument that was used on the Harry Potter Companion website: "with them like a presence" is intended to mean "with them as if it were the Grim Reaper or a reasonable facsimile", which doesn't qualify as this trope.
    • In-universe, Harry thinks pretty much any time the Dursleys show emotion is Narmy, mostly involving Petunia and Dudley. Whenever the Dursleys show affection for each other, expect Harry to "suppress the urge to laugh".
  • Ah, The Inheritance Cycle. Flip the books open to any page. Chances are, you'll find yourself in the middle of a Narmy scene.
    • The 'baby on a spike' scene gained extra Narm thanks to an Eddie Izzard comedy routine on the subject.

"When I grow up, I want to stick babies on spikes!"

    • That scene is made even sillier by Eragon's musings when he sees them: "What does our existence mean when it can end like this?" Less than a paragraph later, he kills a crow because it dared to peck at a corpse. It's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron.
    • The first sentence of Eragon--something like "wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world." And in Eldest, Eragon is transformed into a half-elf, half-human, calls himself a "princeling," and is "more beautiful than any man, more rugged than any elf". Clearly Paolini wanted his readers to be in awe, but...
    • Most of the opening scene is very narmy, such as "the Urgals shrank back, motionless," (so how did they shrink back without moving) and Durza's ridiculous order to the Urgals: "Stop whoever is coming...or die." (Just so the audience knows this incredibly complex character is evil).
    • The scene in Brisingr in which Roran stands dramatically on top of a 20-foot-tall stack of the bodies of 193 men he had defeated. His only stated regret was that there were not enough foes for an even two hundred. While this may suggest even worse disturbing sociopathy than Eragon's while not gelling with how he's been characterized before, the scene imagined was so ludicrous that it was hilarious.
    • In Eldest, the scene where Arya meets some elves, and they form a ring and dance around her for a few minutes, singing. All fine and dandy, if, like Paolini you are not English. If you are, you can't help but be reminded of Morris dancing. Which is hilarious.
    • Oromis's hairless groin.
    • The high priest of Helgrind resembles a certain Black Knight. It's a miracle that he didn't shout, "It's just a flesh wound!"
    • On the one hand, Brisingr is less of a ripoff of other works and more original on Paolini's part. On the other hand, some of his original ideas are a little bizarre, such as that Furry elf who's irresistible to women....
    • Long, untranslated pieces of either the Ancient Language or that noise the Dwarfs make.
    • And then there's the scene in Eldest in which Eragon reads his poem to the elves. Judging by the praise they heap on him, we're meant to be awe-inspired. Unfortunately, the poem is not the lyrical opus the elves praise it as, but an atrociously written, borderline Emo Teen's love poem. There is neither rhyme nor meter, and it refers to eyes as 'enigmatic pools'.
      • Lord Dathedr then says "you have a rare talent Shadeslayer," which makes this troper think he is a secret Deadpan Snarker.
      • This goes for almost any of the verse Paolini includes in the Cycle - he confines himself to Blank verse with almost no metre or indeed poetic attributes of any kind.
    • In Brisingr, Eragon involuntarily kills two birds and a snake to replenish his magic reserves, and "dies three times". We're clearly meant to be touched by his sensitivity. This falls somewhat flat if you realise that this comes after he's slaughtered hundreds of the Designated Villain's soldiers without so much as batting an eyelid.
    • There is also a scene in which the sight of a bee saves Eragon from the brink of death.
    • Either Christopher Paolini doesn't know what "the pox" actually means to a mediaeval person, or he was Getting Crap Past the Radar (at a really bad time) when Orik says his parents died of the pox. Historically (and certainly in the High Mediaeval era that Inheritance is allegedly set in), "the pox" meant syphilis. Yes, that Syphilis. Paolini put a reference to sexually transmitted disease in the middle of what was supposed to be a sad and moving scene. Something you aren't telling us about mum and dad, Orik?
    • Oh, Inheritance is almost unreadable, there's so much Narm. This series just takes itself far more seriously than it often deserves.
      • Such as the moment at the end of "The City of Sorrows" when Roran mentally tells Eragon to "hurry, or I swear I'll haunt you from the grave." While this is not a serious threat on Roan's part, it's clearly meant to be a serious moment showing us the dire situation they find themselves in…but it's such a useless, laughable threat that Roran looks like a wimp. "Just in case feeling overwhelming amounts of anguish/guilt for failing to keep the world from falling to the permanent rule of a horrible, inhuman dictator, letting your liegelord be tortured almost to death, losing the schoolboy-crush-esque love of your life, aren't enough…your cousin is also going to return from the dead as a spook in wherever you live in the ensuing dystopia."
  • The amount of Narm in Sword of Truth depends on your political background (if you're a liberal, his dedication page in one book is a narm). The one thing everyone can agree on is that the evil chicken that cackled was hilarious. The collection of Narms can be found http://sandstormreviews.blogspot.com/2006/08/goodkind-parodies.html here.
    • Most of those make a lot more sense in context, and a few are either false or worded to be deliberately misleading. But the "chicken that is not a chicken," the stupidly long speeches, and the flip-flopping about whether he can eat meat are indisputably Narm.
    • The Narm on that dedication page is still Narm even to many gun and religion clinging Conservatives.
    • The "put a shirt on and fix those stairs or you'll never amount to anything" moment in Faith of the Fallen is about as Narmy as it gets.
  • The ending of Of Mice and Men contains a scene utterly uncharacteristic of the rest the book. Lennie has a mental breakdown and is roundly chastised by a giant, hallucinatory bunny (which speaks in Lennie's voice). The scene is omitted from many play and movie adaptations of the book.
    • Also, if read aloud a certain way, "I like beans with ketchup!" becomes hilarious.
  • The ending of Ben Elton's Chart Throb. Very disappointing in its narm.
  • There is a book about an alien sent to Earth to find love. (The book was clearly counting on attracting the readers of Twilight). It includes the line, "I am here to find a female".
    • The book is called Dancing With An Alien, and its chock full of high octane narm.
  • The first chapter of The Ill-Made Mute has constant Purple Prose. But how can you dislike a book where one of the traditional songs of her fantasy world is a rephrase of "Stairway To Heaven"? And another is Cream's "White Room"?
    • The beginning of Dart-Thornton's next trilogy, The Iron Tree, was much worse. It might even venture into the realm of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. Dying from a sprig of mistletoe shouldn't take so many words.
  • Arguably, the entirety of The Duchess Of Malfi. You've got to love a play where someone gets poisoned by a Bible, there's an echo-ey grave, mad men are cavorting around outside a jail, the heroine holds a dead man's hand ... And a mad incestuous Prince thinks he's a werewolf and later says, "I account this world but a dog kennel." The Cardinal's reaction on being stabbed? "You have hurt me." Oh, dear. The doctor tries to cure Ferdinand of his madness and thinking he's a dog by... trying to fight him. Also, the number of people hiding behind tapestries.
    • Bosola is with both the leads when they die...and has howlers both times. With the duchess, he responds to her brief revival and subsequent final death with a mildly frustrated, "Oh, she's gone again!" With Antonio, he gets the following tactless exchange:

"Thy fair duchess and two sweet children--"
"Their very names kindle a little life in me."
"Are murdered."

    • Most Jacobean drama is like this, which is why it's awesome.
  • Battlefield Earth is loaded with Narm. Johnnie and the Scots find the Marine Corp base, and they find all the weapons that were from 2000 in near-perfect condition repairable condition. This is a thousand years After the End of high-tech human civilization!
    • If it's a Harrier, then repairable condition is as close as you're getting to perfect.
  • Thanks to Purple Prose, the Twilight books have lots of this. One of the best was when Edward was holding his and Bella's baby:

"He was both dazzling and dazzled."

    • Sparkly vampires. The point of the meadow scene is that Edward sparkles, literally. And he says that it's the body of a killer.
    • In the second book, Edward attempts to kill himself by sparkling.
      • Not just by sparkling. By sparkly striptease.
    • The ten blank pages in the second book--to signify that Bella's sorrow over Edward leaving her is so deep that she's not even internally journalling--are either incredibly heartbreaking or incredibly narmy depending on one's view of the series.
    • When Jacob starts going into his "abusive Jerkass" persona, Bella tries to punch him, only for her hand to break in the process. Then she proceeds to hop repeatedly while holding her hand. That is not very dramatic, Mrs. Meyer.
    • Not to mention that while she's yelling at Jacob because werewolves don't age, she actually stomps her foot like she's a little two-year old.
      • Narmier by the fact that she's supposed to be very mature compared to people her age. Informed Ability?
      • Edward isn't any better. In New Moon, when Bella had the Cullens vote on whether or not she should become a vampire, the majority of the family said "yes". How does suave, mature Edward react? He starts shouting "NO! NO! NO!" like a little two-year-old.
  • Nat's first night at Plumfield in Little Men, when Demi goes into his room and winds up telling him the entire life of Christ as a bedtime story.
    • The Glurge-tastic coverage given to the boys at Plumfield with disabilities, physical or mental.

"God don't care; for my soul is straight if my back isn't," sobbed Dick to his tormentor on that occasion; and, by cherishing this idea, the Bhaers soon led him to believe that people also loved his soul, and did not mind his body, except to pity and help him to bear it.

      • Patronizing tone aside, the best part is that "led him to believe" unintentionally implies that it isn't even true.
  • Also from Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys goes into great detail about how wonderful Amy and Laurie's wedded bliss has been, including expounding at length on their perfect daughter.
  • The line "Ftaires! We haue found ftaires!" in House of Leaves is both scary and Narmful at the same time. It is genuinely chilling when you realise what's just happened, but... ftaires! Of course, if you don't realize what just happened, then it looks like Zampano wasn't making any sense again...
    • Possibly lampshaded by Johnny Truant persisting in using an "f" every time he should use an "s" for the next several pages.
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms has one during Cao Cao's escape from his defeat at the Battle of Red Cliff. After running a bit, he stops and laughs, noting that his rival Zhuge Liang can't be that smart or he'd have placed an ambush right at that spot. Cue ambush. After he and the remnants of his army escape, the exact same thing then happens twice more.
  • In A Man for All Seasons. Margaret's comeback to her father's saying something typically Deadpan Snarker-like (if that can be said of Thomas More) was something along the lines of 'You're very gay.' She meant cheery and glad, but...
  • Quite possibly the most infamous Narm moment in all of literature:

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.

    • I do beg your pardon!
    • It refers to a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which is much longer and much worse. Madeline L'Engle referenced it to underline her theme of redemption.
  • Oscar Wilde isn't immune to this. "The Happy Prince" involves a bird and a prince-turned-statue who is crying over being a statue.
    • Most of Wilde's children's stories contain Narm and soppy morals. Most Victorian moral stories for children do. Wilde's work crosses the line twice -- you have to barrel through the narm and then double back and start crying like a girl.
  • Wild Cards has its share of narm, but in particular this line:

"C.C. Ryder's very real nightmare was that she would again become a living subway car formed from nothing save hate".

  • The Lottery Rose features a scene where a young mentally handicapped boy is killed from an attack...by a group of ducks. Special mention for the use of the phrase "Their hungry quacking" for creepy build-up.
    • It's possible that the ducks somehow panicked him into falling into the nearby pond; the scene cuts away right before the crucial moment (understandably, in a YA novel). Bear in mind that the kid in question is supposed to have a mental age of only about two or three.
      • That may be, but... "hungry quacking."
  • A Streetcar Named Desire has a scene when Stella talks about how her abusive husband, on their wedding night, smashed all the light fittings in the hotel room with her slipper. The sheer randomness of that action, combined with a slipper being the silliest weapon ever, makes it hilarious.

STEEEEEEELLLLLLLAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • The poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman brilliantly parodied translation-induced Narm in "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy":

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
CHORUS: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

  • The dramatic scene in Clan of the Cave Bear in which Ayla accidentally uncovers the mog-urs of the various clans cannibalizing the brain of the man slain by a cave bear in a ceremony becomes quite amusing when it hits you that the man's name was Gorn.
  • Neil Gaiman's American Gods. "The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it." Oh no, not the paradigms!
    • Maybe what he was feeling was peristalsis. Which not only shares a couple of leading syllables, also it's something which can be felt!
  • Warrior Cats:

"Defend yourself! Or I swear by StarClan I'll kill you!"
"Then you're a fool, and stupid too!"
"You musn't keep doing that!"

    • You know, saying "Stop it!" would have been much easier.

"These berries are evil!"

  • This line from Miley Cyrus's memoir, Miles to Go:

"I clutched my grilled cheese sandwich like it was the hand of my best friend."

Tyler: "I'm the big bad..."
Meredith: "Jerk!"

    • "Jerk"? Seriously? The guy's a sociopath and a murderer who's trying to rape one of your best friends, and "Jerk" is the worst insult you can come up with?
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:

Arya: "For true?"
Eddard: "For true."

    • Since Arya is very young, laughing at this dialogue might be politically incorrect. And we know what happens to the politically incorrect in A Song of Ice and Fire!
    • From the same series, we have Stannis Baratheon delivering a private eulogy for his deceased brother Renly, which is made narmish when he says something like, "I'll go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach." It Makes Sense in Context, but even so...
    • The problem is that some people use "peach" as a euphemism for "vagina". This probably includes Stannis himself. The double meaning of "peach" may allude to Renly's possible homosexuality, which is hinted at throughout the series. Stannis says elsewhere that Renly's wife is likely to die a virgin; Renly's servants are said to have practice being blind, deaf and mute to what occurs in his household; one of Renly's (male) knights is referred to as "Renly's little rose"; etc. Stannis may be saying that he won't forget the innocent enthusiasm his brother took in little things... but he won't forget Renly's less innocent preferences, either. (Given Stannis's inflexible justice throughout the series, this makes sense.)
    • Many of the sex scenes easily qualify as narm.
    • The multiple uses of "half a hundred" as the number of times something gory happens (the little Targaryen princess was stabbed half a hundred times, someone's daughter was raped by half a hundred men during the bread riots, etc.) makes it less impressive and more "take a sip!"
    • The name "Jon Snow" makes a lot of British readers think of the Channel 4 newsreader and investigative journalist. It wears off quickly enough, but in early scenes one can't help but visualize this old, white-haired man at the wall.
  • In The Good Guy, a novel by Dean Koontz, there's a fantastic line that completely breaks the flow of the scenario. A killer is stalking the two main characters. Seeing the killer's car outside waiting for them causes this line (referring to the male hero) to be typed:

"He wished he were a buttered muffin."

  • A minor example, but Tamora Pierce's Beka Cooper books have the police force, who were called "Dogs" enough that they embraced the nickname, think of themselves as Dogs, call their newbies Puppies and their holding pens "kennels", have to clarify "four-legged dogs" for actual canines, so on. Fine. But sometimes, they go too far. There's a mention of "The Growl", when a large number of Dogs in a tavern together get personal about a case - a few start growling, then more and more, and then all of the ones in the tavern are growling and it terrifies any non-Dog. But that sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a bunch of tough-looking uniformed adults going "Grrr!" together.
  • The Circle of Magic books have many scenes where some mean adult insinuates that the kids aren't awesome in every way and they then prove their skills in a way that renders the adult reeling and speechless. There are so many of these scenes that they collectively become Narmy, and some of them are cheesy. The worst is that one in Will of the Empress when Briar fights the nobleman.
  • The Firm. Mitch McDeere has just narrowly avoided getting gunned down in his own office, and is on the run from the boys in the firm. It's a tense scene. Lots of short sentences. Like this one. He jumps from the building. He runs like hell. He turns down the street. He stops to check behind him. He eats an apple.
  • "Mir. It rhymes with 'fear'." from the short story "Above It All." There are some parts of that story that are truly creepy. That is not one of them.
  • She Said Yes. The whole book is riddled with hindsight-based "insight" from the subject's parents (the book's authors) about how every little thing she did was part of an elaborate path towards the end of her life, repeatedly describing in overblown verbosity the girl's "shocking" lifestyle, which almost any other parent or teenager--or anyone who's seen stories about truly shocking teenage behavior--would recognize as normal adolescence. The only real gravitas comes from knowing the ending in advance (it's the biography of a girl who died in the Columbine High School shootings).
    • It's worth noting that Cassie Bernall wasn't the one who said yes according to the official investigation...
  • Latawnya the Naughty Horse Learns to Say No to Drugs is made of this. It becomes impossible to absorb the moral of the story when it's full of smoking and drinking horses of the non-anthropomorphic variety. The intended Tear Jerker moment involving an OD'd horse lying dead with a joint by his mouth is the icing on the cake.
    • This is probably the truest, most glorious example of literary Narm on this page.
  • There is a "True Story" about a girl who died from AIDS, which she caught when her boyfriend raped her. The tagline is something along the lines of "She thought she had found love...and she lost her life to AIDS." But the true Narm is in the title (cue scary music): It Happened to Nancy.
    • So it can happen to you!
  • More than once in Dracula, the title character is described as going out "in his lizard fashion". It's meant to convey that his movements are lizardlike, but it evokes the image of him wearing some sort of lizardskin waistcoat.
    • It's meant to convey that Harker saw him descending a wall like a lizard would - clinging to it headfirst.
      • How does "Harker saw him descending a wall like a lizard would" not mean "his movements are lizardlike"?
      • The image of someone of Dracula's description doing the Spiderman-thing is still narmish, as well as appropriately creepy.
    • There is also the moment later when Dracula attacks Mina. This scene reads like attempted rape but is brought down by four factors: 1) the fact that the men are all in the room and do nothing about it; 2) that Harker is unconscious in the corner with a red face and the discription of him sounds as if he's drunk; 3) when the men break the door down Van Helsing goes flying across the floor; and 4) Dr Seward completely kills the moment when he likens the scene in his narration to "a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink." Way to kill the mood, Seward.
  • Susan Beth Pfeffer's the dead and the gone is about what happens when an asteroid hits the moon and puts in in a closer orbit to Earth. The main character's sister helps her school grow a vegetable garden for more food. Unfortunately, thanks to volcanic winter, the frost hits in August. Upon seeing her garden destroyed, the sister cries plaintively, "MY STRIIIIIING BEAAAAAAANS!"
  • Lovecraft -- great writer but, ye gods, it is hard to take some of those stories as seriously as you're supposed to. There's just too much blatant racism. For instance, there's "The Rats in the Walls." The story itself is as eerie and, well, Lovcraftian as any; but it seems like every other paragraph has the main character talking about his beloved cat Niggerman.
    • It should be noted that Lovecraft actually had a cat with that name at the time of that story's writing. Yeah...
    • Similarly, the cat in "In Cold Blood" is called Boobs.
    • This troper is a huge Lovecraft fanboy, but the man had serious issues. "Medusa's Coil":

"No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba--for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress."

    • OH DEAR HEAVENS, NO! Surely, this terrible revelation is comparable to having one's mind destroyed by seeing an Elder God! * facepalm*
      • That degree of racism was considered ridiculous and unpleasant even at the time. Besides, the point being made is not that Lovecraft's racism discredits his whole work, but merely that it makes certain scenes lose their impact to the modern reader because of the laughter/fury/FlatWhat factor it causes.
    • Some of Lovecraft's names were hilarious. The Whisperer in Darkness had the potential to be absolutely terrifying, but the phrase "Fungi from Yuggoth" sounds amusing.
      • If you know actual Arabic, the As Long as It Sounds Foreign name of Abdul Alhazred is actually redundant. "Abdul" means "Servant/Slave of the". So if "Hazred" meant anything, than "Abdul Alhazred" would mean "Slave of the the (whatever it meant)." Anything that has two definite articles comes off a little Narmy.
  • This Batman children's book is chock-full of narmy goodness. Highlights include the line 'Batman! This is no time for dessert!' and the Joker stealing a kid's bicycle and riding around on it.
    • The Joker has probably already done that in the comics.
  • The Alex Rider novel Point Blank. The villain's plot is called Project Gemini. There was a famous Real Life space program called Project Gemini back in the 1960s. So, this novel has lines like these:

"We cannot allow you to leave, you know too much about Project Gemini."

    • And we wonder why the American space program has stalled out.

"I've discovered your whole operation. I know all about Project Gemini!"

  • No one has quite yet worked out what possessed Gabriel García Márquez to use the phrase "wormy guava grove of love" in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
    • That might be the translator's fault...
  • The end of My Sister's Keeper, when Anna is killed in a car accident. It's so obviously designed to be a Tear Jerker that it becomes Narm. The Debate and Switch doesn't help.
  • The book Notes on a Scandal gives us the classic line "Miss, miss, can I come in you miss?" whilst Bathsheba and Steven are having sex for the first time. This is an interesting case: the line was meant to be unnatural, emphasizing Stephen's awkwardness in their relationship and the formalities between teacher and student, but the line (for this troper anyway) came across as funny rather than Squicky.
  • The Ruins is a creepy book in which a group of tourists end up trapped on a hill with a man-eating plant. For most of the book, the plant is scary, especially when it's revealed that the plant is sentient and enjoys screwing with them. Then it starts speaking in German.
  • From the Dutch novella Onmacht:

"In een genadeloze opeenvolging valt haar huwelijk uit elkaar. De sokken maken het definitief." (In a merciless consecution her marriage falls to pieces. The socks make it final.)

Dave's eyes flickered open for one last time and he saw the rockets on the base of the Planet Hopper fire into life. What a view! he thought, and then died as the flames from the engines reached the bus which then exploded.

    • The screams of laughter from the readers reached the novel, which then exploded.
  • Mariel in Mariel of Redwall is the High Queen of Mood Swings. After a mean old squirrel refuses to travel with her:

For the first time, Storm felt alone and unwanted. She walked off out of the squirrel's bower into the surrounding trees, swinging her rope. "Me and Gullwhacker don't need anybeast. We're all right."

    • Five seconds later, she's back, and everything's fine. She does this sort of thing repeatedly.
      • She stabilizes a bit once she gets her memory back.
    • Not to mention the line "Sports, playing...what's all that mean?" You've got amnesia, woman, you didn't just crawl out from under a rock! Then there's Treerose and her obsession with being an Attention Whore until she grows up a bit.
  • In the Alan Dean Foster Space Opera The End of the Matter, the heroes encounter a primitive race of sapients on the planet Alaspin called the Otoids. Much is made of the fact that the Otoids...remove the eyes of those they kill and that no one knows why they do this! Oooooh! Scary! Cue inner monologues of characters grimly musing to themselves, "What do the Otoids do with dead men's eyes?" But... there are few things that the Otoids can do with those eyes that could be more shocking that their killing people and then taking the eyes in the first place. The canonical reason the Otoids have is not one of those things.
  • The first six Nightmare On Elm Street films had extremely rare hardcover novelizations. These books appear to have been written for very young readers. Horror + Moral Guardians '80s-style = Narm.
  • The Saga of Seven Suns. The A Is are called Compies. The Gypsy-In-Space Roamers call their enemy, Basil Wenceslas, "The Big Goose." This is like a transplanted bedtime story. And the entire series hinges on Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.
  • Ten pages or so into William Forstchen's Cozy Catastrophe novel One Second After, the reader learns that one of the rugged widower hero's two adorable girls is a diabetic. From then on, you know exactly what must happen, but it takes the entire novel to get there. When it does, Forstchen has to kill the family dog immediately after.
  • The Saga of Darren Shan gives us one of its vampire varieties named "Vampaneze". No. It's not a parody. And they're the scary, evil vampires! You'd think an author would spend more than 5 minutes thinking up a name for the race of a major villain, but here we go!
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe book Fatal Alliance gives us this wonderful part after a Jedi Padawan saves a Sith Apprentice's life, from her point of view: "The Jedi had saved her, and she wrenched herself from him, even as she felt a twinge of gratitude. Surely he hadn't done it out of the vile goodness of his heart!" Yes. Vile goodness. Just in case you didn't know that the Sith were evil with a capital E...[3]
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has a "Great Illustrated Classics" version, which is basically acondensed kids' version. There's a scene towards the end of the book where Merlin sneaks into the cave where Morgan's forces have made their last stand, disguised as a woman, to place an enchantment of Morgan. Despite being in a dress, when we see him he very clearly has a long, thick beard.
  • Transformers Exodus has one. Orion Pax (Optimus) looks out at the Skyline and decides that he wants to rebel against the rigid caste society of Cybertron...so that he can go to an amusement park.
  • Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark has some pretty terrifying and downright traumatizing stories and images. Then somebody took it upon themselves to animate the stories. Some of them are effective, but some of them... In one of the more famous stories, Harold is terrifying in the illustration. In the animation, he looks to have a LEGO head.
  • Dan Brown's prose is frankly dreadful, which ruins quite a few moments in The Da Vinci Code. For instance, "She could feel the ancient blood coursing through her veins."
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles is genuinely tragic, but ... when her illegitimate rape baby falls fatally ill and Tess's abusive father won't allow a clergyman in to baptize him, so Tess does it herself, and then reveals that she never got around to naming him, and then decides to christen him SORROW, complete with melodramatic capital letters, just as he dies ... well, that's laying it on a little thick.
  • Although Dave Wolverton's proclivity for referring to testicles almost exclusively as "walnuts" throught The Runelords, the narmiest part of the series is the short review written by Orson Scott Card included at the beginning of each novel, which is a little bit too emotional to take seriously.
  • "You wanted a house by the ocean. Well, the ocean can cut both ways!"
    • Don't worry about it. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. Amen.
  • The final chapter of the eleventh Haruhi Suzumiya novel [4] is truly epic Narm. Fujiwara's conversation with Mikuru during the former's Villainous Breakdown has both characters sound like they are in a Soap Opera. It's kind of hard to take the words, "I don't want to lose you again, Onee-san!" seriously when it's Fujiwara saying them. And it doesn't help that there is a very melodramatic illustration for this scene which looks like it was taken out of a Shoujo manga.)
  • While The Lovely Bones generally has very good prose, it's hard to take this line seriously:

She asked for coffee and toast in a restaurant and buttered it with tears.

  • Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: This popped up a few times. For instance, some of the conversations between Jack and Harry fall victim to this because Jack called Harry "you big silly!" A number of reviewers reported having laughed at lines like that, because they know for a fact that men do not talk to each other like that in Real Life.
    • In addition, the series is heavy on Melodrama, which has led to Narm a few times. For example, Kathryn's rant about how the law works for the criminal in Fast Track is hard to take seriously, because they are in the U.S.A., and the law is certainly not supposed to work for the criminal there!
    • In the book Under The Radar, the men receive some National Guard outfits. Ted Robinson, a 30-something year-old man and reporter, calls it a "speckled" outfit. At least one reviewer found that part rather difficult to swallow!
  • In The Odyssey, men break down crying over and over again. It's not so bad when it's Telemakhos, considering he's only on the cusp of manhood and he only does it once or twice per book, but Book 10 features Odysseus and/or his crew breaking down every other paragraph. Eventually, the crying stops being dramatic and turns into this.
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower has a particularly narmful passage in which, at the start of one of his letters, Charlie describes his newly discovered ability to masturbate. And yes, this is one of the times he uses, "Wow!" in a completely serious manner.
  • Moby Dick includes this gem. "Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules." A severe case of Having a Gay Old Time - even worse than the book's actual title.
  1. ↑ Why is this book legal?
  2. ↑ They have sex.
  3. ↑ She's Tsundere, so to speak, and hating the fact that she had to be rescued by a 'good guy' when Sith usually consider themselves Above Good and Evil.
  4. ↑ Which is the reason it's listed here and not under Anime & Manga
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