As part of my 2025 reading-resolutions, I DNF-ed more books that I wasn’t enjoying than I might have done in previous years. I’m happy to say that that significantly lowered the number of truly awful/harmful/boring books I read, that would qualify for this list. Most of these therefore, were more so disappointing than objectively bad. That being said, there were inevitably going to be a few stinkers that snuck through my defenses. This list is all about them.

Unlike my favourites, I didn’t rank these books and will go through them in no particular order. As I have written reviews for most of them, I will defer to them where possible.

1.        Nameless Things by Ernest Jensen

I know I just said I wasn’t going to rank these about 2 sentences ago, but let’s start off with the book that’s perhaps the most “objectively bad” out of all of them. Where most of my gripes for books later down the list could be categorized as a matter of taste or style, this felt like a matter of quality. The Nameless Things is an indie-published horror novel about two friends who encounter an ancient horror whilst on their camping-trip in Devil's Cup State Park, Colorado. The plot is riddled with plotholes and unresolved side-tangents, the narrative voice made me cringe and the author seemingly couldn’t decide between writing a B-movie-like horror with tongue-in-cheek snarky humor, and actually attempting to scare the reader. This felt more at home on a creepy-pasta subreddit, and although I’m usually more lenient towards indie-published works; when you ask full price for a novel, I expect a certain level of quality. That wasn’t met in my opinion. My full review can be found here.

2.        The Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner Next up is another horror book that just didn’t deliver the quality I hoped it would. Where The Nameless Things at least had entertainment-value going for it, The Girl in the Creek commits possibly the biggest sin a horror-story can commit: being utterly boring and unmemorable. It too – like The Nameless Things – is set in an American National Park and follows an investigative journalist on the tail of a string of disappearances that took place in the mysterious woods there. One of the disappeared individuals happens to be her brother.

Its stunning cover, eco-horror-vibes and comparisons to Annihilation (how many times am I going to fall for that trap before I learn my lesson?!) had me excited, but after only a few weeks I couldn’t remember a single event that took place in this. The definition of a bland-2-star for me.  

3.        The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

As we’re on the topic of my least favourite horror-reads of the year, let’s get the final one out of the way as well. Unlike the last book, The Staircase in the Woods was quite memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. Inspired by the urban legend of “Stairs in the Woods” that was popular a couple of years ago online, we follow a group of friends who encountered such a stairs as highschoolers. One of them ascended the stairs, never to be seen again. Now, 20-years later the staircase has returned, and the (now adult-) friendgroup ascend the stairs together, in search for answers as to what happened to their childhood friend. The story takes strong inspirations from Stephen Kings IT, and as such deals with some very serious topics surrounding childhood-trauma in various forms. Unfortunately, I hated the way Wendig decided to go about approaching those. Addiction, depression/suicidal ideation, eating-disorders, childhood trauma and abuse (including sexual) and on-page violence and gore are all used for shock-value, rather than in a genuine attempt to explore these topics. This is one I’d actively recommend against reading.

4.        Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Let’s give the horror-genre a break, and move over to some fantasy and science-fiction. Here, a very beloved author makes an appearance once again, and I can already hear the angry typing in the comments coming. R.F. Kuang and I just don’t match. I’ve enjoyed Babel just fine, but have actively disliked all her other novels so far, and Katabasis unfortunately was no different. This time, I’m less so in the minority, as this seems to be her least popular release to date. Other reviewers have already mentioned its plot-holes, lack of worldbuilding, oversimplified characters and dull, dragged-out narrative.  For me, the biggest problem is the same I’ve had with all of R.F. Kuang’s works: for an author that branded herself as “kicking against the elitism of academia”, she writes some of the most pretentious and self-obsessed inflated-air out there. Through every sentence, this author seems to want to talk down to you or show off her clever references to “obscure classics she studied” (because clearly “only smart people will be familiar with the concepts of Hades and Dante’s Inferno”…) It so desperately wants to be perceived as smart, that it forgets to actually explore its themes to a level that would justify that label. One of my biggest frustration with this book is its fanbase, that keeps perpetuating this novels self-obsessive bloat by telling anyone who didn’t like it that “they just didn’t understand it”. The truth, as far as I’ve experienced it as someone who’s been in academic circles for quite a couple of years now, is that Katabasis has an audience-problem. It tries to be highly academic and might alienate a general audience in that process. It’s actual explorations of academia are so flimsy thin, that readers that are actually familiar with the traditions will see straight through it, and have a similar reaction I did: "Rebecca, get of your high horse. It truly is not that deep…"

5.        Overgrowth by Seanan McGuire

Moving on to another incredibly popular author, we have Overgrowth by Mira Grant. This one hurt a little extra, because I was hoping to love this one. I wrote a full Good-Bad-and-Ugly review, so I won’t go into too much detail here. We follow an alien who’s been living disguised as a human among us for over 20 years now. Soon her kind will return to earth in order to overthrow it and exterminate humanity. However, our POV-alien has gotten quite attached to the quirky humans, and is unsure where her alliances lie now. Ultimately, it was a mixture of mismanaged expectations by the marketing-team, and a well-intended message that got só lost in the plot that it ended up shooting itself in the foot with its metaphor.   

6.        It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken and An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis

The number 6-spot is shared by two books that I’m grouping together because I disliked them for very similar reasons. Both are slim novels with an utterly weird premise through which they explore themes of grief and body (straight up my alley!). I also bought both new after reading their first pages standing in the bookstore, and being sold by the prose (something I rarely do!). Strangely enough, even the authors names sound similar…

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a horror literary novella about an undead woman, tracking across a desolate landscape with a crow living inside her chest, exploring the grief of the life she once lived. (I told you it was going to get weird). An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is an unnamed narrator with a failed career as a method-actor behind her, as she struggles to regain the ability to walk in the wake of a seismic event that leaves the world constantly unstable. Unmoored by the shifts in the dystopian world around here, she (seemingly without reason) begins to fantasize about killing her roommate.

Both these novels stumble their execution in that they’re so stream-of-conciousness, so literary and alternative and so desperately trying to be profound in their strangeness that they tip over into pretentious meaninglessness. Halfway through either, I was só tired of these authors playing wordgames and hinting at their points rather than actually exploring them, that I wanted to throw the book across the room. Full reviews can be found here and here.

7.        The Merge by Grace Walker

In the penultimate spot is a book that, for about the first 40% or so, felt like it might be a favourite of the year. It’s for the absolute nosedive it took from that point on, specifically with its ending, that it earned itself a spot on this list.

The Merge is a speculative sci-fi/dystopian novel that follows a near-future England where a highly controversial and experimental procedure to merge two people’s consciousness into a single body, is pitched as the solution to the growing overpopulation problem. We follow four duo’s, all undergoing an experimental version of this Merge, first in the weeks leading up to the procedure, and later in the aftermath of it.

This book posed a lot of fantastic questions during its set up, that really had me engaged. It unfortunately decided that it had no intention of answering any of these questions, and instead posed a completely new set of them halfway through, only to not-answer these either… This is one of those rare books that was truly ruined by its twist, although that wasn’t the only problem with it. A full review can be found here.

8.        The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins

Closing off this list is a book that’s the definition of disappointment. With its 3-star rating, this was by no means bad, but the fall from my expectation to my enjoyment was tall enough to kill a grown man. The Unmapping was one of my most anticipated debut releases of 2025, with a premise that I still love. It’s a speculative novel that follows a cast of New Yorkers navigating a strange and silent disaster that unfolds every night. Every night, at 4 AM precisely, New York City descents into chaos as every buildings, blocks and street in town switches places randomly. You could go to sleep in the Bronx and wake up with your house suddenly connected to the foot of the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue. In the utter chaos this creates, we follow multiple POV’s, with a focus on front-line workers in this “crisis management”.

The execution just wasn’t what I hoped from it, and I have a full review here where I go into details on why. Overall, this might be my biggest disappointment, simply for how much badly I wanted this book to be on tomorrows list, rather than todays.

That concludes my worst and most disappointing reads of 2025. As always, feel free to comment your worst read of the year, and check back in tomorrow for some more positivity, as I share my favourite reads of the year.