Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Maybe I just don't get out much, but I'm really surprised that writing of such abysmal quality actually gets published. There are the repetitions: page 3 - 'hieratic and demotic scripts, which are essentially the shorthand or cursive form of heiroglyphics', page 14 - 'hieratic and demotic scripts, which are essentially the cursive and everyday form of hieroglyphic writing'. (Do publishing houses still have editors on staff? Do editors actually do any work?) There is incorrect grammar. There is some of the most ridiculous, pointless plotting I've ever encountered (the narrator decides he needs to talk to his friend Alan Henry. Alan Henry is not home. The narrator tries, unsuccessfully, to get the super to let him in to his friend's apartment. Finally he uses a chisel to break in. Then nothing happens, the narrator leaves, because, DUHH, his friend is not home. ???? And why is the friend almost always referred to as Alan Henry, instead of Alan? Very weird.) But the real killer for me is the inexorable awfulness of the prose. How about this? '...ever since then it seemed as if the spirit of Zenobia bore down upon me, a puzzling sensation that shifted from bemused tolerance to possible reconciliation to straight vengeance'? The sensation of the spirit of Zenobia bearing down upon him shifts from tolerance to reconciliation etc.? Well, this would puzzle me too. And this isn't to worst of it ... this is just the point at which I decided I'd had as much bad writing as I could take. It seems to me that perhaps this would have been a perfectly nice first draft for a novel; I just wish someone had whipped it into at least a marginally readable product before I plopped down $22.95 for it.