YOU KNOW WHEN you read a review that begins with the line “Welcome back to our ongoing dissection of the putrescent pile of bat guano…” that it’s going to be a must-read review. I mean… there’s no question WHERE the review is headed, but it’s obviously going to be a fun, albeit damning ride.
So when I was on Google today trying to find something I had posted and ran across a review of Covenant that compared my first novel to a pile of bat shit… I had to take a look. That’s when I realized that this was actually Part VII of an ongoing “review” of Covenant. Which, really, isn’t a review at all. I quickly realized that this is actually a mean-spirited Cliff Notes of my book. A wickedly snarky Cliff Notes, admittedly, but a “review” doesn’t retell and then skewer EVERY SINGLE PLOT POINT of a story, page by page, through eight installments (yes, spoilers indeed LOL!) It goes on for so many pages (with a plethora of amusing graphics too!) that I copied it into Word to get a word count to see just how long it is. This poor, venomous woman spent hours and hours writing about my book!
20,000 words!
How cool is that?
Covenant itself is only 86,000 words. The amount this woman wrote ABOUT the book is more than 1/5 as long as the book itself! This, my friends, is what is called “making an impression.”
I skipped back to Part I of the review, and read the sad story of how my novel snuck into her home, stowed away there for a couple years until she read it, threw it against a wall and then somehow escaped the garbage bag when she thought she’d taken it to the resale shop to rid herself of its excrementitious pages. I read about how the story wouldn’t leave her (see? I did my job!) so that she decided the only way to rid herself of it was to put down every thought and feeling she had about the book to try to exorcise it from her mind. And then maybe burn it.
Wow. 20,000 words of piss and vinegar about Covenant. She builds up to a higher pitch than the novel manages itself, and I was really anxious to see how it all finally summed up in Part VIII of the “review.”
Only to find out when I got there… she ISN’T DONE!!! Problem is, it’s been a month since she posted the last installment (this rant apparently started in August). So now I’m worried that I may never see how it ends. Talk about a mean tease!
If you’ve read Covenant, you have to take a look at this. It is absolutely the most enjoyable thing I’ve read this year! She had me laughing uncontrollably about my own book several times.
You can’t say I didn’t make an impression. And isn’t that what art is all about? Generating emotional response? I guess I did it! Read the “review” here. But be warned, there is alcohol use and lots of nasty words involved:
http://www.nerdsraging.com/2013/08/11/a-rage-filled-review-covenant-by-john-everson-or-rape-rape-the-rapening/
Note: the original site is now gone, but you may be able to see the text here, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
