And it goes out with a BANG!
or
How to Make a Bad Review Good!
I got another Publishers Weekly Review today.
This is my third review from them.
They loved Scarecrow Gods.
They loved Multiplex Fandango.
To say that they love Blood Ocean would be stretching the meaning of the word past any credible elasticity. In fact, I think they hated it. Why do I think they hated it? Using critical thinking and my knowledge of the English language, comments such as
'tolerable prose,' '
shallow world-building,' and '
repellent' have led me to believe that they indeed hate it.
But the clincher was the closing line.
The result is a throwback to horror's unpleasant past, from which most readers have long since moved on.
Ahhh.
Feel the hate.
Embrace it
But what does it mean?
Before we can answer that, here's the entire review,
lifted from their site.
Blood Ocean
Weston Ochse. Abaddon, $9.99 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-907992-87-2
A plague has left the City on the Waves, a ragtag community of decaying ships in the Pacific, isolated and desperate. Kavika Kamilani sets out to find the killers of young drug-runner Akamu. This quest will cost Kavika his closest friends and family, shatter his world, and cast a terrible light on the secret power structures in command of his tiny community. Stoker winner Ochse writes tolerable prose sabotaged by shallow world-building. The novel begins promisingly enough but soon descends into displays of cliché and violence. A plot predictable to anyone familiar with Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron is married to antiquated social and sexual conventions; the fate of a transsexual character is particularly repellent, as is Ochse's decision to describe the Korean characters as cannibals. The result is a throwback to horror's unpleasant past, from which most readers have long since moved on. (Feb.)
Reviewed on: 01/02/2012
So again, what does this mean? In my opinion, it means that the reviewer didn't get it. Although this falls under the PW umbrella, everyone who works for them has their own personal tastes. Blood Ocean is a cross-genre book, embracing both horror and science fiction. Clearly the reviewer is a science fiction reader. Blood Ocean was probably handed to him or her and he sat back with a glass of Chianti thinking about what a fun time he'd have with a science fiction book-- after all, he compared the plot to Norman Spinrad instead of Ed Lee, Brian Keene or Jack
Ketchum. By the second chapter he experiences the first of many horrendous physical occurrences that is standard fare in
today's horror. And the badness increases. exponentially. A lot of bad shit happens to people in this book. It is, after all, called BLOOD OCEAN.
I hope I didn't put the poor reviewer into therapy.
Also, and I can't say this for sure, but I think it's true, this is the first Abaddon Book, maybe the first Afterblight book, to be reviewed by Publishers Weekly. In the world of Afterblight, Abaddon created an entire world that was built on the dystopian premise that things we've outgrown and overcome have come back to haunt us as we fall back into our base needs, desires and beliefs. In the world of the Afterblight, we homogenize ourselves out of fear of others. We look at those who are different and are afraid. We are scared of anyone who isn't us... and for good reason, in the world of the Afterblight, what is unfamiliar will kill you.
The reviewer claims I use cliche. Really? At the end of the world when everyone is trying to survive, they're going to turn on the others and keep to their own kind. Is this cliche? Or is it how we'd view the reality of it?
So, what should this jamoke do about the review? I'm certainly not going to hide it. Other than what I've done, I don't really feel a need to explain it. So instead, I'm going to use it as a marketing point.
How's this: "BLOOD OCEAN, a book so horrific and real that Publisher's Weekly found it repellent and unpleasant."
Or what about this: "BLOOD OCEAN, a throwback to everything you love about horror."
Or maybe this: "BLOOD OCEAN, a book so violent that Publishers Weekly became angry at the deaths of it's many characters."
I really think this was a problem with reviewer expectations. And it's hard, you know? I get it. Dystopian books are normally science fiction fare and not horror. The reviewer probably felt tricked. He or she actually things the horror reading and writing community has moved away from violence. Shhh. Don't tell Clive Barker or Ray Garton that. For god sakes, don't allow Ketchum or Lee to come anywhere close to this spicy tidbit of knowledge. They'd be devestated, as would we all.
It's clear that science fiction reviewers don't like blood, gore and violence. Take zombie novels for instance. Who do you think reviews them? Zombie books, which are almost entirely caused by science, are reviewed by horror reviewers. I mean really? Are these horror books? Or are they science fiction books?
See! This is what happens when you mess with genres.
Oh yeah. I haven't ever read Norman Spinrad, but I think I will now.
Also, there's something I'm going to watch for this coming year. Two of my friends have books coming out from major houses. Both of them are as equally dystopic and violent, if not more so, than Blood Ocean. One is a zombie novel that is sure to be reviewed by a horror reviewer. The other is just a nasty dystopian novel, sure to be reviewed by a science fiction reviewer. I'm curious to see how they fare.
And one last note on the idea that horror has an
unpleasant past. Unless they're talking about the crazy cover art of the 1970s and 1980s, I'm not aware of any unpleasant past. In Brian Keene's
Keynote Speech for AnthoCon 2011, he talked in depth about the history of horror. He takes us all the way back to 1796 and brings us forward through the first, second, third and fourth waves of horror. The New Weird. Then next generation. he talks about it all, and as a chronicle of the horror genre, there is none better than this speech.
But he does talk about the 1990s.
Some say horror died in the 90’s, but this is patently untrue. Horror as a marketing category to be stamped on the spine of a book certainly died, but the stories and books and readers were still there. From 1991 to 1995, the most prominent mass market horror publishers were Zebra Books and the Dell Abyss line. Zebra was your traditional mass-market pulp house, cranking out novels with garish covers. Dell-Abyss was a little different. Started with the mission statement of getting away from the traditional horror of King, Koontz, and Straub, Dell Abyss was to publish more cutting-edge horror, and for a while, they did. Then the whole thing came crashing down, leaving folks like Brian Hodge and Kathe Koja homeless. Meanwhile, over at Zebra, authors weren’t getting paid on time. Zebra collapsed, too, which left authors like Rick Hautala and Ronald Kelly scrambling. (Credit Brian Keene)
If this is the unpleasantness to which the reviewer was speaking, then yes. It was damned unpleasant. But this had nothing to do with violent prose. If that were the case then there would be no Girl Next Door or Night They Missed The Horror Show. This had to do with marketing strategies and production.
I've always been careful about writing violence in my fiction. Nancy Goats, a novella about a
young gay man who gets abducted by a group of mixed martial artists worried me the most. But when friend and fellow author Hal Bodner read it and emailed me how much he loved it, I knew I'd found the balance. I try and find this balance in all my work. I knew BLOOD OCEAN was going to be violent. Just look at the setting. It's Mad Max on water, for heck's sake. Freaking Violent. People die. Some revert to cannibalism. Other people try and do things that no man or woman should ever suffer.
Badness happens.
But I guess badness only happens in horror fiction.
So if you want violent, character-driven fiction, then BLOOD OCEAN is for you. For as long as horror reviewers like Paul Goat Allen read, review my fiction and put me on the list of '
extraordinary writers,' then I know I'm doing it right.
So here's my favorite blurb of the three: "BLOOD OCEAN, a throwback to everything you love about horror." Which is yours? Do you have a better one I can use?
Yeah. That should do it.
Have a Happy New Year's people.
Looks like it's going to be a damned good year!
