Writing Book Reviews — How and Why
I’ve been in reviewer overload lately, reading, taking notes, and penning reviews for the next issue of Black Gate. But, more than that, I’ve also been coordinating our crop of reviewers this time out, and thinking in terms of what exactly it is that ought to be in the review section of the magazine, not just in the reviews I put up on my own website. Having done over 50 reviews in the last year and a half or so, I think I’ve learned a few things, and I’d like to share my thoughts on what a good review should consist of. And at the end of this essay I’ll also offer some practical advice to anyone that wants to become a web reviewer themselves and share the reasons behind just why someone would want to take the time to review a book in the first place.
The first distinction we need to make is between a book review and a book report. Reviews are critiques that take a lot of factors into consideration and demand a certain level of knowledge and discernment from the reviewer. Book reports are those bland plot summaries you used to have to write in school to prove to the teacher you actually did your assigned reading. I’ve seen so-called reviewers whose work falls squarely into the later category but, aside from generating web content for google, such work holds little real value.
House of Frankenstein (1944)
Fans of Tom Waits are often divided into two camps: those who favor the early boozy Kerouac, be-bop inspired crooner of life’s derelicts and losers up until he transmogrified beginning with the “Heartattack and Vine” album and “crossed over” into Kurt Weill cacaphonous orator of the absurd; fans of the later period sometimes disdain the earlier, and vice versa, despite the obvious connections. Me, I’m in the third camp as a huge admirer of both milieus. (I suppose there’s a further quarter of people who can’t stand Waits at all, but, much like the folks who still tiresomely maintain Dylan hasn’t done anything since his protest days, aren’t worth serious attention.)
Before he became a regular artist for Black Gate, Bernie Mireault was already something of a Renaissance man in the comics industry. He’s been a writer, artist, letterer, and highly acclaimed colorist, and worked with Matt Wagner (Grendel), Joe Matt, Mike Allred, and many others. His comics include Dr. Robot, Bug-eyed Monster, The Blair Witch Chronicles, and his masterpiece, The Jam.
I say “first meeting that we know of” because Bernie and I were born in the exact same (and very small) place — a Canadian Air Force base in Marville, France — only a few years apart in the early 60s. Did we pass briefly as toddlers in the officer’s mess, and maybe compare our love for cartoons and comics while our fathers saluted each other over trays of french bread and beans? Probably not. But hey, man. It’s possible.
I was commenting the other day on the surplus number of wonderful S&S anthologies I’ve stumbled on since a friend and I began a collaborative shared world writing project a few weeks ago, both writing stories set in a fantasy/medieval city with a history and a river and neighborhoods and taverns and all the usual trappings. His background in world building (via D&D or whatever) is less than mine, and mine is quite scant, so our efforts have grown in odd bits and pieces: first the tavern, then the name of the city, then a mountain backed up against it, and so on.
The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.
I read an interesting post the other day by a thoughtful blogster whose name I cannot now remember and whose post I cannot locate again, who professed his surprise at all the fans of Conan (and Sword & Sorcery in general) who were returning to the fold now, after falling away in the 1980s, after the last Big S&S Boom.