The Goodreads Killer by Dave Franklin
My rating: 2/5 cats
i really thought there would be a speck of fun in this book. just a speck.
i wasn’t expecting miracles – i knew it was going to be a novelty book that was just bait for goodreaders to read, maybe laugh at some satire, chuckle with recognition as they got poked fun at. maybe a whiff of “remember-when?” over the whole STGRB scandal. i certainly wasn’t expecting a super-sophisticated satire-slash-parody that would hold up under scrutiny and really shine a light into the corners of this little microcosm so many of us operate in as our only social outlet.
but a speck? is that too much to ask for??
i have no idea what this is.
you know what it’s about – it’s about an author who is mighty sad that he got panned by a goodreads review whose reviewer didn’t even bother reading the whole book before castigating it and hiding behind the anonymity of the interwebs to use humor and vitriol to power trip and make himself feel better while not thinking of the poor author who poured his blood, sweat, and tears into the creation of the book. and all the friends of that reviewer who gave him virtual high-fives, making the poor author blue and frustrated and plan to give up writing, conflagration-style. this kind of boo-hoo rhetoric is coming from the character’s perspective, but these are not actual quotes.
however, fate intervenes in the form of a creepy smelly homeless gentleman who bullies the author into going to this office where he meets a different creepy gentleman who offers to help him kill the reviewer, because that’s what they do. no strings attached killers-for-hire who make critics… go away. also, a hot secretary who is a fan of his book and who allows him to have highly stylized intercourse with her for an interminable amount of pages while reading to her from his book.
author wish-fulfillment, yeah?
and a fun idea, despite very real and deplorable tactics that occurred in the past and that we aren’t going to go into here.
but as an escalation of that incident and a giggly revenge fantasy, why not? this could have been a fun little ride. and it could have been very cleverly done.
but it’s just… boring. throughout the book, our poor beleaguered author demonstrates the same kind of hyper-critical and unfounded bashing that he was on the receiving end of; deriding his critic’s own attempts at creative writing, and also his U2 cover band, which mirroring could have made for a horribly heavy-handed opportunity for “everyone’s a critic and you take it in stride as the world continues to turn and we are all entitled to our hatred blah-di-blah,” but it doesn’t even slow down enough for that pat of an observation.
instead, it goes into an erotic and violence-based bore-fest that i guess has one of those “gotcha!” endings but it doesn’t seem earned or necessary or… anything.
i don’t generally write negative reviews. i try not to. “every book its reader” and all that. but i don’t think this one was even trying to be anything. this feels like a whim – like “i will write a story, ostensibly about goodreads and all the goodreaders will read it and probably trash it and then i can kill them.” and it’s a good idea. except for the killing part. don’t kill me, please. but as anyone who has ever found crumpled bar napkins with inarticulate night-before scrawls on it knows – good ideas still need to go through the morning-after clarity of editing and tightening. don’t coast on a concept – you still need a story. and if you have to use intercourse as a filler, make it purposeful. empty intercourse is just masturbation, after all.
is the kind of pithy pseudo-wit you will encounter if you read this. and you should read it. and then come here and we will have virtual high-fives.
seriously – A for trying, but it needs to figure out what kind of story it wants to tell and then just fucking tell it. there’s something here, it’s just all bloated and bogged down in itself. a shame, really.
