Reviews

This is probably something you’re not supposed to do. Verboten, as the Germans say. One of those unwritten rules that everyone seems to know, and everyone appears to respect. Probably for good reason, too. But I’m breaking it.

I’m going to comment on some of the reviews The Lucifer Messiah has gotten. I’m not going to name names, or point fingers, and I’m not trying to “shoot back” at anyone. But this post has been dying to get out of me for over a year now, and if I don’t write it now, well…

My first gripe, and by far the biggest thing that bothers me about reviews is this: at least read the damn book. And I mean read it. Don’t skim it or speed-read it. Of course, feel free to do those things if you want to, I’m not telling anyone how to read, but if you are going to scan the book then don’t write a review purporting to have actually read it.

Case in point. One of the first reviews Lucifer got made me want to pull my hair out (luckily I have very little). I was astounded when I read it. It’s one thing to not like a book (although oddly enough, this person actually did) but it’s quite another to make it obvious from your review that you didn’t even really read it.

This particular reviewer’s attempt to summarize the plot actually invented scenes that aren’t in the book, and the details that he/she did get right only led to further misstatements of the story. I was within a few moments of emailing the reviewer to list my complaints. Ultimately, my agent and my editor both talked me down. Their logic was respectable – it’s a 5 star review and you’re a first-time novelist, let’s not rock the boat. Take the good press and ignore the mistakes.

And I did. Until just now.

Second point. I said it then, and I’ll repeat it now. I’d rather someone dislike my book for the right reasons than praise it for the wrong ones.

And there’s a good reason for saying that.

One of the things that bothered me for a while after the book came out was that I didn’t actually get any bad reviews. That’s not boasting, there’s an explanation in order. Most of the reviews that popped up on the web were from people I know. Many of my friends and family did their best to support me by writing a little blurb on Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s site. Which is great. But I wanted real market penetration. I wanted the book to get into the hands of people who have no idea who I am and who couldn’t care less about my delicate feelings. Now it has. And I have the bad reviews to prove it.

On balance, I’d say the reviews have been generally positive. The Cleveland Plain Dealer gave me a nice write up (and Karen Long is no pushover from what I can tell). A couple of others said it was a good, quick read and had positive things to say about the writing itself. One mentioned it in the same breath as Clive Barker and another even called it “visionary”. So I feel okay about the reception it got. I’m not winning any awards or selling hundreds of thousands of copies, but I’m a first-timer with an independent publisher, so I have to be pleased.

But what about those bad reviews?

There’s one on Amazon, a three star gem that I’ve probably read over a hundred times, and another on Barnes & Noble, which is, at this moment, the one and only 1 star review the book has gotten. That person couldn’t even finish it. My apologies. Sorry to have wasted your time.

In all seriousness, here’s how I look at it.

I spent the first fifteen years of my writing “career” cranking out fantasy that adhered pretty closely to genre conventions – Conan and Tolkien and Moorcock-inspired invented-worlds tripe. None of it was all that good, and none of it saw the light of day. With Lucifer I tried to do something a little different. I tried to blend some genres and do some things I hadn’t seen done before, and I tried to push the limits of what I had seen.

Maybe I didn’t succeed. Hell, maybe it was presumptuous of me to try to push the envelope of what giants like Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman had already done. Clearly some people didn’t like it. But that’s the point. The reason I’ve read the three star Amazon review so many times isn’t because I hate it. I think it proves that I may have done what I set out to do. (And I stress MAY.) Some of what the reviewer writes is dead wrong. The timescale is supposed to be convoluted, to a degree. There was no mysterious change in the editing process as he seems to think he’s uncovered.

The rest of what he writes I actually like though, in a backwards sort of way. Yes, the characters are largely inhuman, and yes the title isn’t reflective of what most people would expect. Those are entirely deliberate acts. I wanted to subvert the reader’s expectations. I wanted to tell a story through the eyes of the “bad guys” -- the monsters themselves. And most of all, I wanted to tell a story that took the Christian concept of Lucifer and turned it on its head, a story that not only made Lucifer the “hero” but actually operated on the premise that everything you think you know about Lucifer is wrong: that he’s not the devil, that he’s nothing more than a pagan myth that the Church quite consciously demonized -- so long ago that no one questions the truth of it anymore.

You may not like what I tried to do, and maybe I didn’t do it all that well, but at least some people seem to have “gotten it” -- one way or another. The bottom line for me is that if you want to do something interesting, something different, then you have to take some risks. And when you try to do that, some people either aren’t going to get it or aren’t going to like it. Or both. But I guess it beats being a hack.

The Doctor of Demise...?

I just got a package in the mail from Medallion Press. It contained two T-shirts. They had my face on them.

Or a version of my face, a stylized artistic representation, you might say.

The shirts look cool. They’re solid black with a bloody handprint on the front that holds a Medallion Press logo. The back promotes my signings as well as the two other authors appearing at The Festival of Fear, Gary Frank and Joseph Laudati.

It is a weird thing though, to see your face on a shirt. I’m told that Medallion has had banners made up to hang in the convention center, one of which has me dubbed “The Doctor of Demise” -- which is also a little surreal.

There's a picture of the back of the T-shirt on the bottom of this blog page. It bills the three of us as Masters of the Macabre.

Festival of Fear, Part II

My last post discussed The Festival of Fear next month in Toronto, but I realize that I didn’t mention where or when that’s happening.

The details (and some cool promotional artwork from Medallion Press) are up on my main site, but I’ll put it down here too.

Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from Friday August 24th to Sunday August 26th. The Convention Centre is located at 225 Front St., right by the CN Tower and the stadium that I think is now called the Rogers Centre, but Rue Morgue’s website still has it as the Skydome.

I'm scheduled to sign copies of The Lucifer Messiah on Friday from 5-6, Saturday from 1-3 and Sunday from 12-1.

Also appearing at the Festival are George Romero of The Dawn of the Dead fame, Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange and Sean Astin -- Samwise Gamgee from the The Lord of the Rings.

The Festival of Fear

I'm not sure if anyone is reading this. In fact, I'm reasonably certain at this point that no one is reading this blog.

But it's only been up for three days, and you have to start somewhere.

I'm scheduled to appear at something called "The Festival of Fear" in Toronto next month. Medallion Press has arranged for me and a few other of their horror authors to sign books during the convention. I don't really like book signings, for reasons I'll get into in a future post. But I did a few at BookExpo America in DC last year, which was (I think) a similar setting to this thing in Toronto. The Medallion reps did a fantastic job of driving foot traffic to the booth in DC. So good in fact, that it actually began to appear as though I had fans -- for a few minutes. Then I looked over and saw that I was signing books during the same time slot as Newt Gingrich and the Born-Again Christian Baldwin brother, both of whom had much longer lines than I did.

I don't think either of them will be at The Festival of Fear though.

In any case, as I understand it, this festival is put on by Rue Morgue, a Canadian horror magazine. I read a few issues when Medallion put some ads in there for Lucifer last year. The content was good. Lots of gore and some really sick stuff that beats the hell out of anything I've written. So I'm hopeful that they'll be putting on a good convention.

This will be a first for me. I've never been to any kind of fan convention. I'm not quite a Trekkie (I won't even use the "correct" term Trekker) although I do love the show. Any inkling I might ever have had to attend a Trek convention though was stamped out about two decades ago by the infamous William Shatner SNL episode. I have never even considered going to anything similar since.

Will it still be lots of guys who live in their parents' basements, only walking around wearing Jason goalie masks instead of Spock ears?

I'm curious to see. If they want to read one of my books, I don't really care what they're wearing anyway.

New Weird

What kind of book is it?

That’s a question I get asked fairly often. Is it Horror? Is it a Thriller?

My publisher classifies “The Lucifer Messiah” as Paranormal/Supernatural under their Horror banner. Originally they called it Dark Fantasy, before they changed their genre classifications this year. I think Barnes & Noble’s website had it ranked as an Urban Fantasy at one time. One bookstore I visited had it shelved in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section, and another had it in the Horror section.

One reviewer plainly referred to me as a “horror novelist” while another one claimed to be disappointed in the book as a fantasy writer himself (or herself, I’m not sure).

So what is it?

Horror, fantasy, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, urban dark fantasy, supernatural, sci-fi/fantasy, or just plain old fantasy?

My answer? None of the above. And all of the above. And maybe something else, too.

It’s not a cop out. I’ll try to explain.

“The Lucifer Messiah” has elements of all of those genres. There’s blood and gore, a staple of horror fiction. There’s sword fighting and pagan mythology, both fantasy mainstays. The setting is almost entirely urban and much of the plot involves supernatural creatures, for which something like a pseudo-scientific explanation is suggested.

That covers everything right?

But at the same time, it’s not scary, so it can’t really be called horror. There are no elves, fairies, dwarves, wizards or anything else you expect in post-Tolkien fantasy. The supposedly supernatural elements explicitly reject any connection to actual gods or religions, and the sci-fi bit is just that, no more than an oblique reference.

So it isn’t any of those genres. Right? In that case, what the heck did I write?

This is why I have a hard time breaking it down into a few words when people ask me about it in casual conversation. For the record then, here’s my attempt at an explanation.

Weird Fiction. Or maybe New Weird, if that’s possible.

Neither of those are my creation, so let me give credit where it’s due. Weird Fiction, in my mind, conjures up the work of Clark Ashton Smith, a woefully under-read guy these days. I think it also covers a lot of the work of Robert E. Howard (even some of the Conan stuff, which is pretty much the standard-bearer for Sword & Sorcery these days) and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work would probably be classified as straight horror in many cases.

These folks all had their heydays during the pulp fiction years of the thirties and forties. Smith especially wrote a lot of what we would now consider cross-genre stories. Almost all of them involved some kind of ancient, lost magic and some sort of horrific monster or a vaguely-evil wizard summoning dark, forbidden things in a dying, creepy old city.

I am not in Smith’s league. But if I could put my stuff in any “category” of fiction, I’d want it grouped in some way with that “genre.”

Another possibility is what some people have taken to calling “New Weird” which already has its own wikipedia entry, so it must be real. (What did Michael Scott say about that -- “anyone can write in, so you know it must be true?”)

The writer most closely identified with New Weird is a British guy named China Mieville, who for my money is the most talented fantasy/sci-fi/horror/cross-genre writer working today. If you haven’t read King Rat or Perdido Street Station then you’re missing one of the most interesting voices out there.

New Weird, if it is a real thing at all, is a conscious merging of all of the above-mentioned categories into something that includes elements from all of them; a genre that rejects familiar genre conventions, you might say.

If I ever become half the writer Mieville was five years ago (when he was in his early-thirties!!) I’ll be more than pleased, so I’m not going to nominate myself for inclusion in the same category as his work. It’s something to strive for.

So what is “The Lucifer Messiah”?

You’ve just read my best guess. But I’m open to other suggestions.

Blog

I said I wouldn't do this.

Blog.

Is that a verb now, too? To blog?

I remember when it meant something else, and if you grew up in the 80s around a certain dead-end street in North Jersey (or know someone who did) then you know what I'm talking about.

Back to the point. There are thousands of "writer's blogs" out there. I read a few of them occasionally. It's a lot of the same stuff -- here's how I got published, and here's what you should do if you want to get published too or here's an utterly self-involved rendition of everything I'm doing, and don't you just find it fascinating?

Within the publishing community it's already become a cliche. Another writer's blog. And that's pretty much what this is.

Welcome.