Two authors I used to like, but did me harm

I deplore the nonsensical trope that "books" are A Good Thing: only some books are Good - and a small minority. 

Others books are Bad, in the sense that they are actually intended (whether consciously or not) negatively to affect the reader. Indeed; nowadays this applies to a large majority of contemporary and famous books: fiction and non-fiction.

In particular reading the wrong books at certain times in our lives can do us spiritual harm. 

Perhaps this only applies to people like me who seriously engage-with, and are thus influenced-by the books they read. In my experience, to do significant spiritual harm we must like, or at least admire, a book at the time of reading (for whatever reason - and the reason for liking/ admiring may itself be a bad one). 

The first author to have a significantly bad influence on me was probably Michael Moorcock; whose Jerry Cornelius books I began reading aged 21 at a time when I was somewhat depressed, or at least frustrated. I also read quite a few other Moorcock books, but the Jerry Cornelius series were the ones that did the job. 

I got onto Moorcok via another writer called Jack Trevor Story, who was a friend of Moorcock and said that M was one of the major living writers, an excellent writer. 

So I read Moorcock with that expectation and belief; although I could not actually experience Moorcock's excellence. His prose seemed flat and drab, and I had great difficulty following what was happening. 

This difficulty (deliberate, in these "experimental" novels) had the effect of making me engage more intensely on the basis that I "must be missing something"; and as a result Moorcock's calculatedly "hip" hedonistic nihilism synergized with my mood of the time to produce its bad effects.  

A similar phenomenon came a couple of years later, when I read a good deal of Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Slaughterhouse 5 - which was actually recommended and lent to me by Alasdair Gray, at our first meeting. 

Vonnegut is a far better writer than Moorcock; being extremely skilful at construction, highly inventive, and deeply witty in his early books (up to Breakfast of Champions). 

But underneath this is an aggressively bleak, hope-less, and immiserating ideology; rooted in ultra-materialist assumptions; a trait that got worse and worse as V grew older. 

Vonnegut apparently sets-out to generate the belief that despair is the only outcome of honest realism - and he did a pretty good job on me - again at a point in my life when I was tending that way myself. 

In sum; at a couple of periods of my life in which - for whatever other reasons that were primarily causal - reading Moorcock and Vonnegut made bad things significantly worse; and tended to make me "get stuck" in a bad place. 

My interpretation nowadays is that M and V were both people who had chosen the dark side in the spiritual war of this world; and who chose further to propagate and infect others with their negative world-view by means of their writing. 

Moorcock - a lesser writer - did this in an obvious and in-your-face way; the brilliant Vonnegut sugared his bitter pill with wit and skill. 

Consequently, I have no desire to re-read anything by either of them*, and on-the-whole regret the attention I once gave them.

*Except for Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut, which is such a well-written, ideas-packed, and clever black comedy, that it is worth the temporary net-depression of spirits induced by reading.