Richard Dansky

I’ve talked about writing reviews before in this space, but, upon further (ahem) review, I realized that my work in that regard was not quite finished. Sure, I’d talked about what I thought was important in a review, and John B. Rosenman had posted an excellent essay about his reviewing techniques, but I realized I’d left out the most important thing.

I’d forgotten to talk about how to write a bad review. Not an unfavorable one, mind you – a bad one. A book review that completely and utterly fails to do the most basic job of a book review, which is to talk about whether or not the book is worth your (the reader’s) while.

Now I’m not talking about critique here. That’s a whole other kettle of fish, and not at all what I’m interested in here. Bad critique, I’ve found, often has the twin drawbacks of being simultaneously boring and incomprehensible, and thus is rarely read by anyone not in the critic’s or author’s immediate families.

But reviews, well, those are out there – especially the bad ones. And so, in the interests of saving future bad reviewers everywhere the effort of re-re-re-inventing the twin-belted radial tire, I humbly present what, in my opinion, are the keys to getting it done.

(Not that I’ve ever done any of these. Nope. Never.)

1-Make sure the review is all about you.

Focus on any connection you might have to the work, no matter how slight. Discuss where you were when you read it, as well as how you felt, what you were wearing, what Arcade Fire song you were listening to at the time, and which particular mutant subset of “coffee” you were drinking as you skipped to the end and read the last chapter. After all, a book review should not be about the book. It should be about the reviewer.

2-Expound extensively on what you would have done if you’d written the book instead

This is key. What the author did is really just a starting point for people who are much, much smarter – say, reviewers, or slash fanfic writers eager to insert Jean-Luc Picard into any situation imaginable – to show what the book should have been. It’s particularly important to get this out there in a review, because odds are the review’s going to be the first thing someone reads about the book, and you get to stake your claim to it before anyone else.

3-Be clever. Be really, really clever.

Everyone knows the real reason to write book reviews is to get one of your lines quoted and used on a dust jacket. So, dig deep and find your wittiest witticisms. Torture your syntax. Bring your most obscure metaphors out of cryogenic storage and gene-splice them to obscure references worthy of peak-period Dennis Miller. And above all, make sure that you drop as many as you can into one-sentence paragraphs, so they can stand out.

Like this.

Or this.

Shorter and sweeter than a sample-size mandarin orange crème brulee made by angels in the pastry kitchen of heaven.

You get the idea.

4-Dogpile on the rabbit

If you don’t like a book, don’t bother with analysis as to why you don’t feel it’s worthwhile. Certainly don’t take the time to explore what might be positive in the book, or what other readers might enjoy. Accentuating the positive, and what might be worthwhile in future works from the author is a mug’s game. Get out your junior-grade Wolverine strap-on claws and start ripping. The wordier and more verbose you are, the better. The more savage and cutting your slams, the more likely you are to get quoted on message boards, and to have your cleverness reaffirmed by the patrons thereof.

This is particularly important if someone else has slammed the book, or if someone you don’t like has praised it. The former starts the always-popular game of “Who can get in the nastiest one-liner”, while the latter demonstrates your superior taste in a way that taking your toys and going home can no longer quite accomplish.

5-Let the concept take you higher

Writing a precise yet detailed description of what a book is like can be hard work, often requiring multiple attempts. Instead, it’s a lot easier to describe it as “X meets Y”. If you’re feeling particularly energetic, you can go as far as to say “X meets Y in Z”, where Z is the setting from a third property you’ve read recently. It doesn’t really matter if the signifiers you’ve picked to establish your high concept are appropriate or not. What matters is that they’re popular, and that they’re a sufficiently incongruous that mixing the two engages the review-reader’s curiosity. So, for example, you can call Tim Powers’ Last Call “The Golden Bough meets Season 2 of C.S.I.”, which is about as appropriate as calling Jaws a movie about summer in Long Island, and produce a sufficiently unique mental image to consider your job well done.

The key, of course, is adding these references without providing a single bit of supporting evidence as to why they might appropriate. It’s far better to leave them dangling out there like anglerfish lures for the unwary, and besides, supporting evidence can mess up your sentence flow.

6-Cliches for the win!

Certain phrases, in addition to saving you valuable thinking time, are guaranteed winners. These include:

• “On steroids”
• “On acid”
• “Goes up to eleven”
• “The new Stephen King”
• “Like a video game”

If you can combine more than one in a phrase such as “like a video game on steroids, with elements that go up to eleven”, you get bonus points. And possibly a souvenir t-shirt.

7-Review something besides what you’re reviewing

Let’s face it, you don’t always get to review what you want. You may be jonesing for the chance to unleash your critical eye on the latest Stephanie Meyer or Lewis Shiner, but instead, what lands in your lap might be Book 6 of the Hootenanniad, an epic fantasy of basketball-playing elves waging eternal war against the restless evil of orcish tax accountants. Despair not, however – there’s a way out. All that it takes is a link, no matter how tenuous, from the book you are reviewing to the one you want to review, and presto, you’re on preferred ground.

It’s simple, really. Pick a transition like, “Contrast this to how this author I like much better did it in this book I like much better”, and you’re off and running. Or, there’s always, “this character brings to mind comparisons with this other character I like more, who has all these really cool attributes”, and away you go.

8-Write incredibly flattering reviews of anthologies by editors whose future anthologies you want to get invited into.

Because they never, ever, ever notice when you do that.

9-Facts are for wimps, and grammar is for commies

I’m sure there are places out there where facts matter, but book reviews aren’t one of them. Or any of them. Or some of them.

Feel free to plow straight through to your point without bothering to check whether you’ve gotten minor details right, like, say, character names, the title of the book, or what actually happens along the way. If someone’s reading the review, they know what you’re talking about anyway.

The same goes for grammar. You’re telling someone about a book here, damnit, and what’s important is that you get across your feelings. If the rules of syntax and grammar can’t contain the gushing wells of literary passion that this particular read has inspired in you, then the hell with them! Publish, or at least blog, and be damned!

10-Write long

After all, a review that isn’t a significant fraction of the length of the book itself can’t possibly give you an in-depth analysis of what’s going on there. The purpose of a review isn’t to discuss whether something’s good or bad, or worth the reader’s time. It’s to provide a detailed version of “and then this happened.” Think of it as liveblogging Jane Eyre, and you’re on the right track.

11-It’s not a spoiler, it’s a scoop

You have a responsibility to your readers to protect them from any surprises that the book might offer. That’s why you regard it as your duty to unleash and any all major spoilers the book might contain in the first paragraph of your review, the better to cushion readers against the shock that comes later. Dumbledore dies? The cute boy is really a vampire? Drizz’t Do’Urden is actually the grandson of Oberon of Amber? That’s the sort of news that people can’t wait for! By getting that information out there, you’re doing your readers a service, and they will love you for it.

And so will the authors.

12-Leave ‘em guessing

Do that, and they’ll come back for more, or a least that’s the theory. It’s not important to actually let the reader know what you thought about the book. It’s not even important to state whether or not you think it’s worth reading. All of that brings your writing back down to a merely commercial level, and besides, it pins you down. It’s far better to offer random bits of observation without wrapping them in the straightjacket of an actual opinion.

Then again, it might not be.

There are lots of terrible things you can do with books, should you be so inclined.

You can maltreat them. Spill coffee on them, bend the spines back, read ‘em in the bathtub and drop ‘em in the lavender-scented suds. Then you can try to fob them off on the local used bookstore, claiming they’re perfectly readable, and get all shirty when the clerk points out that the spine has a waveform like radio emissions off the poles of Jupiter.

You can burn them. This is a long-time favorite of various flavors of fascistic and theocratic ignoramuses, though it must be noted that while burning books may give you more shelf space, it also adds to your carbon footprint, and that’s bad. All that soot goes somewhere, you know.

(True story: Whilst I was employed at a publisher who shall not be named, we supposedly got a phone call from a group looking to stock up in anticipation of a book burning. And, since our material was so obviously satanic, they thought they’d give us a call to see if they could get the kindling wholesale, instead of retail. We cleared more slow-moving material out of the warehouse that day than…but I digress.)

You can ignore them, stack them up unread and leave them in a corner. Let the dust gather and the spines warp under the weight of all of the other “gonna get to” titles you’ve got lined up, lose them and leave them unread, only to be discovered when it’s moving time and there’s only so much box space for books to go around.

Worst of all, though, is what I do. I review them.

***

Why do book reviews? After all, I could be writing my own stuff, instead of commenting on someone else’s. And why on earth would I, a writer trying to establish myself, run the risk of horking off the people whose books I review? I’ve asked them myself a time or two, but I find that there are good reasons for me to take up my pen in the service of reviewing, and to devote words that might otherwise have gone elsewhere to the noble craft of saying “Hey, that one’s pretty good.”

Let’s start with the practical reasons for me to write reviews, not the least of which is that I spend a lot of time on planes and in hotel rooms. If I’m going to have that time, I’d rather spend it reading than playing my DS, hearing my fellow passengers discuss their symptoms of gastro-intestinal distress, or watching the endless episodes of “Two and a Half Men” that seem to have replaced the in-flight movie as airborne entertainment of choice. Furthermore, since airplane seats are not designed for anyone who isn’t shaped like Bernini’s Aeneas to work on their laptops in-flight, writing on a plane is right out for me.

I might as well read, then. And if I’m going to read, I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to try something different, material I wouldn’t necessarily have picked out on my own but which my editor feels I can comment on cogently. In other words, when that reviewing packet comes in from the fine folks at Green Man Review, I generally have absolutely no idea what the hell is in there, and look forward to the discovery with horribly jejeune child-at-Christmas glee. After all, there’s new books in that there box, just waiting for me. Whee!

As a result, my reviewing then becomes a way to discover new authors. Susan Palwick’s short story collection, The Fate of Mice, gobsmacked me as I sat in an uncomfortable airport chair, waiting to board an endlessly delayed puddlejumper. I confess now that I never would have picked it up on my own. Howard Waldrop had always been in my “I need to read him someday” pile until Things Will Never Be the Same dropped in my lap. Now I’m a stone fan. John Gordon. Storytellers’ own Elizabeth Bear. The list goes on. For that alone I’d say I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of reviewing.

Then, beyond that, is the challenge. As far as I’m concerned, there are two things a book review should do, two questions that it should answer for the reader.

1) Is the book worth a reader’s time and/or money?

2) If so, why? If not, why not[1]?

The first seems straightforward, and it can be. Is the book good? Is it worth reading? It’s not quite a yes-or-no system, but it’s close. And if that’s all a review does, providing a good, honest, and consistent answer to that question, then it’s done enough of its job to be considered a keeper. After all, that’s why most folks read reviews – to get advice on whether something’s worth their attention. A definitive “no” from a reviewer you trust is more than a short read; it’s a rescue from the waste of time, money, and good humor that comes from being trapped on an airplane with only the adventures of Glognorf the Axe-Hewer amidst the Lizard-Kings of Sknarf to read (which you picked up because the cover art looked intriguing in the airport bookshop and you didn’t know any better, doncha know).

If you find a reader whom you can map your tastes against with reasonable accuracy, that’s valuable. Even if it’s not someone you agree with, that works – if the matters of disagreement are consistent, then you’ve got a working referral metric in place that ought to do you just fine. A reviewer who hates everything you like and likes everything you hate is 100% accurate. You just have to learn how to read them, and once you do, you’re set.

The second question, though, is the more interesting one for me, and the part that makes reviews interesting for me to write. I can generally figure out my gut reaction to a book fairly quickly, but understanding why I have that reaction is what requires thinking. Doping that out and then trying to distill that understanding for the reader then becomes the challenge that makes the whole thing interesting, and useful to the reader.

It’s not enough for me to say that I liked the graphic novel 21 Down but had some reservations. Laying out what those reservations were gives the reader a better look at both the content and the approach of the material, and lets them make a more educated decision. It also lets them decide whether my objections are ones they might share, and therefore whether they should heed or ignore what I’m pointing out. As for me, I get the challenge of framing those concerns while making them readable, instead of just listing off a Recitation of the Kvetch. If I don’t figure out why I liked or disliked something, then I feel I’ve failed as a reader, and I haven’t taken everything away from the book that I could. If I do dope it out, however, and can express it, then I’ve taken more away than I might have if I were just reading for myself.

It is, dare I say it, fun writing to do. So long as there’s something in the reviewed material to think about – good or bad – then digging deeper and presenting that unearthed material to the reader can be a lot of fun to do.

Buried in all of that is the other reason for me to do reviews, one that relates to my own writing. As noted above, reviewing gives me the chance to read a great many different authors. Doing good[2] reviews forces me to read closely, and to analyze what all of those diverse authors are doing. In other words, it’s a crash course in modern fiction, one where there’s no final exam but my own work and the syllabus is ever-changing. Not everything I’ve reviewed, I’ve enjoyed. Not everything has offered something more than a pleasant read (or an unpleasant one). The sum and total, however, has been a mandatory thinking about writing, complete with often superb examples, and curriculum that always provides something new.

Occasionally, I’m even paying attention.

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[1] And don’t even think about emailing me with “that’s three questions”. It’s a Boolean condition. You get one or the other. Two total. So nyah.

[2] At least, I hope they’re good.