Rejection sucks. Being rejected to your face hurts. Being rejected by judges and publishers you never met in favor of less talented authors frustrates and feels unjust.

Last May, I entered my novella, Goddess of the Night, into the industry-led American Book Fest American Fiction Awards. I didn’t expect to win. I wanted to win—even if it was ninth-place runner-up in the literary fiction category. I hoped some publisher would read my book and enjoy it. I prayed they would help me market it. At the very least, I expected an email notifying me I lost.

None of those things happened.

If I lost to Ernest Hemingway—or some other author I respected—I would graciously accept defeat. If I lost to someone more popular, someone more widely read, someone whose books sell, I would understand. But this year’s American Fiction Award for literary fiction went to Ted Morrissey’s Crowsong for the Stricken.

Apparently, Morrissey has a PhD and is a stalwart of the Midwestern Gothic genre (whatever that is). Editors compare him to horror authors Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House, from which Netflix’s acclaimed show is derived).

I read the first few pages of Crowsong for the Stricken. Morrissey’s prose is disorienting and verbose. Like some freshman creative writing major, he clogs his story with details that don’t advance the plot, with stale adjectives, and with cliched descriptions, such as: “It was a crisp October wind and orange embers bright in the starless night fell upon the Harper’s roof like God’s wrath become visible.”

Really? He couldn’t think of a better metaphor than hellfire? Or a less laundered adjective than “crisp”?

Creative writing PhDs can write. One of my favorite authors, TC Boyle, was an English professor at the University of Southern California. Perhaps even Morrissey can. But the prose in the Amazon preview of Crowsong was hardly award worthy.

A political thriller awarded by the American Book Fest is equally appalling. In his best impression of Victor Hugo’s worst Notre-Dame de Paris chapters, Alan Thompson drones on about the architectural history of Washington, DC, for the first several pages of his novel, Juvenal’s Lament. In fact, his history takes up the entire Amazon’s preview of his novel. All I can expect beyond page 6 is more failure.

All rejection sucks. But when you are ignored for inferior writers whose stories and words are so flawed they wouldn’t pass high-school English, when you know you penned a better-written, more coherent tale that unveils more about human nature in 187 pages than these novelists squeeze into tomes three times as long, rejection is more than an act or a feeling—it’s personal, it’s unjust.