Reviews, My Way

While I'm in the mailing-out-and-waiting phase, I've decided to review some books. Because I read an absolute godawful amount of books.

I've been hesitating because reviewing is a bit of a quagmire. You can really piss people off, and you can really offend them. The net is really bad for this. Normally I wouldn't mind, but 1. hate mail would bother me and 2. someday I would like to go to a RWA conference and have people speak to me. So I've decided that if I read a real stinker by someone I might offend, I'm just not going to review it.

I realize this is completely chickenshit so, in penance, if I ever get published I vow to send copies of my book to every snarky review-blog I can find, to be ripped to shreds with no strings attached. (Or to be ignored, as the case may be.)

Also, I'll never do plot summaries in my reviews, on account of their utter boringness. If you want a plot summary, go look the thing up on Amazon. I only have so much time. Be warned.

Also, I'll only spend so much time finding a graphic of the cover before giving up, so I might not put up the covers too often.

So far, so good, at least for me.

As my first review, I was going to write this insightful essay about The Historian, but then I wandered around the net and found that Candy at Smart Bitches already reviewed it, and she already said my opinion, word for word, only she did it last October. So if you want my opinion of The Historian, read it here.

If you read the comments, you'll see that Laura Kinsale agrees with her, so I guess I'm not crazy, which I really wondered when I finished this book and said, WTF?

For the first 200 pages I was happy as could be - I was eating it up with a spoon. Then I fell into a coma for a long, long time, and when I woke up, Dracula was dead, and the plot was so absurd I could barely follow, and everyone was sitting around discussing what had happened in a civilized manner and I was so disappointed.

There's one thing Candy didn't touch on in her review that I just have to add, because I've read the original Dracula about ten times - I just love that barmy, messy, nasty old book. The reason I love it is because the original character of Dracula is still scary. Kostova's biggest crime in her book was to make Dracula just... not scary anymore.

You see, in the original, Dracula is basically a dead beast with a thin veneer of civilized gentleman over it. But underneath, he's the base, terrifying beast in all of us. So he takes all these dull Victorians and he drives them mad with fear - he makes them start wanting to eat spiders and cats, and he makes them want to do kinky sex (blood-drinking, you know) with him and he makes them want to go to crypts and do unspeakable things to female dead bodies, and they start liking these things, which terrifies them even more, and is fun to read.

In The Historian, he just wants his books catalogued.

This is a crime against Dracula. He's supposed to drive people mad with fear! The book would have been better if Rossi had started eating animals and Helen had wanted orgasmic blood-drinking sessions and the narrator's father (name?) had started having orgies with female vampires the way Harker did. Now that would have been a book.

Wait, that's Dracula.

Sigh. The moral of the story is, if you want good vampire fiction, just read Dracula. I think I might do a reread. It's unsurpassed, over a hundred years later, and looks like it always will be.

Okay, next review will be a romance novel, I promise.

Abby