It’s always a lurking danger when dealing with novels, novelists being by nature the vilest narcissists this side of book reviewers, but this year it runs the table in the “Worst Fiction” department: arrogance. Specifically, the belief on the author’s part that they, and not their stories, are the proper object of their readers’ attention. Ordinarily, it’s a vice endemic to memoirs (or the Stevereads-dreaded memnoir, in which the author rather ostentatiously lies about things they’re at that moment attesting to be true). But the blurring of categories between fiction and memoir – seen in the baleful rise of the “my-life-in-literature” hybrid known as the “shelfie” – has allowed a certain sinister seepage into the precincts of fiction, and along with it the aforementioned arrogance that idiot-memoirists employ as a stock-in-trade. Certainly this explains a great many of the crappy novels on our list today: “I sat down to write this,” we hear our authors say, “True, I didn’t bother to shape the plot or craft the dialogue – whatever – but it comes from me! Are you calling nine thousand Twitter followers wrong??” The result is an inversion that always bodes poorly for the Republic of Letters: fiction that’s more painful to read than it was to write. Here are the worst offenders of 2014:

10. California by Edan Lepucki (Little, Brown) - If there were a special Stevereads award for “Worst Example of Somebody Who Never Reads Science Fiction Half-Assedly Writing Science Fiction” (we could call it the Atwood Prize), this ridiculous bit of fluff would win it even in a fairly crowded field. Lepucki’s disjointed story of young couple navigating a post-apocalyptic America is even more thoroughly stuffed with genre cliches than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – it’s a wonder there was room left for crappy prose.

9. Revival by Stephen King (Scribner) – The bedrock mystery of Stephen King – how the man could write fiction steadily for 40 years and never, even for a moment, get any good at it – gets no solution in this turgid, tangential, boring, self-referencing kinda-sorta “update” of the classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw,” with plenty of soppy period sentimentality and King’s usual trite, leaden gear-work involving priests and losers doing stand-in for good and evil. Prime Atwood Prize stuff here, as always.

8. Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead) – Oyeyemi’s labored, boring novel, the story of a young woman named Boy who arrives in a small Massachusetts town in the 1950s, meets people with names like Arturo, Mia, Webster, Snow, and, eventually, her own daughter Bird, and encounters ham-fistedly-rendered versions of benighted racism at the hands of characters who might as well have been named Snarkly, Bad-Baddy, and Smog in this limp little storyboard for a bad Hallmark movie.

7. Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole (Random House) – Cole’s latest ghastly-dull novel harps at yet more length on the slang and depradations of postcolonial Africa, as his main character returns to Nigeria after a lengthy stay in bloated old racist America, only to encounter a long chestnut-string of expat cliches in such rapid order that the whole thing might have been a kind of prose version of a Wole Soyinka one-act stage lampoon – except there’s no good humor here, no intelligence, and no style. If the reader didn’t know that Cole himself was Nigerian, the book would evaporate entirely.

6. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (Putnam) – The sheer popularity of this disasterously cliched and lazy novel about three female friends in Australia raising kids and dealing with ‘family stuff’ is appalling enough even when seen at a distance; when you actually hunker down to read it, things get ever so much worse. The writing is utterly lifeless, the five main characters are shrill and flat, and the two big plotlines are wrapped up so unimaginatively that the book’s last 50 pages feel like some kind of elaborate prank.

5. Young God by Katherine Faw Morris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – Telegraphic chapters, tweet-long paragraphs, and a young author who looks like the ‘reality-TV’ show cast member you’re supposed to love to hate – there’s everything here to despise in a debut novel except length. You can read my full review here.

4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell (St. Martin’s) – The burning question of whether or not popular children’s book author Rainbow Rowell could follow in J. K. Rowling’s footsteps and make a successful move to adult fiction (Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy being, against all odds, quite good) isn’t answered by the steaming pile of poop that is Landline; or rather, it’s answered in the worst way possible: for a large section of the reading populace, this is adult fiction now.

3. Friendship by Emily Gould (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – Our baleful theme of arrogance could scarcely be better exemplified than by this bloated status update masquerading as a novel: you’re quite simply not supposed to pick up this book without first knowing who Emily Gould is – and that a priori justification is openly meant to justify this entire little vanity exercise.

2. On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee (Riverhead) – The last of our Atwood Prize-winners, Lee’s bumbling, self-contradictory botch of a novel is exactly the kind of dystopian novel a writer knowing nothing and caring nothing about genre fiction (to say nothing of internally-consistent world-building) would produce if he wanted to generate some creaky ‘social commentary’ and net a rack of plaudits from book critics who, like him, wouldn’t go near real science fiction if their Starbucks Rewards cards depended on it.

1. You’re Not Much Use to Anyone by David Shapiro (New Harvest) – In a narcissism black hole singularity, the goddam author is on the book’s front cover.