I couldn't bring myself to finish "A Trip to Gotham," but I had assumed that the author had intentionally written breathtakingly bad fiction in an attempt at humour. I had assumed that is was, in essence, a full-story version of a Bulwer-Lytton contest entry. If that is the case, the author probably delighted in the story being mocked.
Also, since we don't have the entire story at our disposal, we don't know the context. For all we know, this sample could be a story-within-a-story, similar to my piece
The First Fanfic. In my story, we see a sampling of Lois's first attempt at writing fan fiction. We know from what bits we heard of her Wanda Detroit purple prose that she was hardly a polished author of fiction. I therefore made my story-within-a-story a deliberately bad Mary Sue. I won't say that the framing story I wrote was phenomenal -- I was very much a fledgling fiction author myself at the time-- but it was worlds better than Lois's. (At least, I sure hope it was.)
Joy,
Lynn
