Unfortunately, no. I've been racking my brain ever since I first read some of his prose work, months ago, and I haven't been able to come up with any really good examples. It's probably been a good 25 years since I read the stuff, and I doubt most of it was from major writers, but I still recognize the flavor, you know?
The one author who comes strongly to mind is Harlan Ellison, both his fiction work and his essays. I want to say Ellison makes the style work because he knows how to be entertaining or moving while being overwrought and also has a good sense of what details are important, but it's been a long time since I've touched his work and I suspect I wouldn't find it as elegant and effective as I did when I was a dumb kid.
What really comes to mind is anthologies of Golden Age science fiction, interwar and midcentury stuff by second-tier SF writers. Maybe also early Stephen King, which was often a cracking good story with sludgy prose. Some of the tropes he uses--slow poisoning of a spouse, for example--feels pretty early/mid 20th century pulp.
I hope somebody with a better memory or more familiarity can help out!
Sweet claims in some of his bios that his work has been compared to that of Stephen King and Joe Lansdale. (For some reason, he doesn't provide links to any of the nonexistent critics who make these nonexistent, ludicrous comparisons.) So he's probably trying -- with egregious lack of success -- to imitate King and Lansdale in particular.
Sweet can usually manage to write a simple declarative sentence that contains no errors in grammar, diction, usage or spelling. But his attempts at writing fiction are so aggressively terrible on so many levels that analysing what's wrong is an overwhelmingly hopeless task. Nonetheless, I'll take a shot at hitting a few of the high spots.
(1) A complete and utter lack of originality. Everything I've read by him is either a thinly disguised revenge fantasy or a thinly disguised sex fantasy. In both cases, the main character is always a thinly disguised Jonathan M. Sweet his own self.
(2) His stories are riddled with major factual errors. This is most noticeable whenever he attempts to introduce science into the narrative. He is simply too arrogant and too lazy to do research beyond what is necessary to "borrow" plot elements as "tributes."
(3) His characters are invariably two-dimensional props. They exist for the sole purpose of being clumsily maneuvered through the derivative and hackneyed plot. They have no backstory and almost no personality; they are motivated by either revenge or sex, unless the story is a longer work, in which case they may be motivated by revenge and sex. It is simply impossible to have any interest in -- much less sympathy for -- his characters and what happens to them.
(4) His dialogue is grotesquely bad. And his constant use of phonetic spellings of demotic speech is howlingly incompetent. His dialog sometimes contains so many apostrophes that it is incomprehensible and looks remarkably like transliterated Klingon. (From
The Kestron Lenses: "“Good luck t’y’ll when you get back to school in ’loxi, y’hear?”) His characters who are supposed to be educated Southern college students often sound like they're attending a casting call for
Porgy and Bess. And no Southerner has ever said
ayup instead of
yes or
yeah; but Sweet seems to think it's common usage in Dixie. His dialog is the work of a tone-deaf moron and constitutes nothing less than a master class in how not to deal with regional or ethnic accents in prose.
(5) The racism. The characters Sweet describes as "boisterous Negroes" (one of whom he names "Buckwheat") in
The Kestron Lenses make a fine example. And Sweet's attempts to write dialog in black English (like his attempts to draw black people) are unintentionally hilarious -- and racist.
(6) A feeble command of idiom. It is not surprising that someone with Sweet's total lack of social awareness is also maladroit when it comes to using expressions that have a meaning that deviates from the strictly literal. He routinely mangles these constructions.
(7) "Show, don't tell" is one of the prime dictates of writing fiction. Sweet ignores it. A good example of this is how he describes the places his characters visit in their quests for revenge and/or sex. Instead of properly setting the scene, he will write something along the lines of, "They went to a picnic area surrounded by trees." Really makes you feel like you're right there in the middle of the action.
(
A lack of even an amateur attempt at editing by some semi-literate person. Typos, misspellings, grammatical blunders, punctuation lapses, factual errors and continuity problems are far too common in Sweet's work. Just because material is being published on the Internet doesn't mean that readers should be subjected to an avalanche of errors in the text.
I could go on, but what's the point? Sweet rejects all criticism out of hand as the vicious and envious yammering of lesser beings. His mind filters reality, shifting it out of phase with the world the rest of us live in. (For example, in his mind, making terroristic threats means he "said some unfortunate things" or maybe just possibly "went too far"; in reality, it's a serious crime.) He regards his comics and his fiction as works of genius that go unrecognized because of a vast conspiracy. In reality, both are weapons-grade crap. The quality of his work will never change; he will never change; he is incapable of doing so.
