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.