Honour amongst thieves

Anyone dropping by recently might have noticed the number of tweets railing against a recent book I’ve been reading. In short, it was a terribly written novel, published in a genre that I have some affinity with, by a respected publisher and by an author who has written enough books to know better.

I’m torn between writer and reader right now. You see as a reader I want to warn anyone off buying this, not because it’s just my opinion that it’s rubbish but I get the awful feeling this has been written purely for commercial reasons and readers aren’t going to get much out of it; judging by the reviews, the ending is a cop-out and has been written expressly to be turned into a series of books AND films (of which the first is already going into pre-production and was announced even before the book was published which had the alarm bells ringing from the beginning) – which I suppose is no reason to slag-off a book if it was well-written and remotely original. In this case it is not. In fact there is nothing positive I can say about this book, other than it was mercifully short – perhaps another reason why readers would feel pissed off shelling out eight quid for something that reads like an over-inflated novella.

But as a writer, there’s something about ‘honour amongst thieves’ that has stopped me from coming out with the title of the book. On the internet there is no shortage of writers published or not, who have no qualms about slagging off other authors, sometimes personally, but I’m not one of them. I’ve seen writers attacking bloggers and vice versa, sometimes hysterically, about a review they have not agreed with, and life is just too short and too busy to fend off a lunatic novelist or their fans whose book you just didn’t like.

I also know how a bad review feels, so coming from another writer it might feel as though one of your peers is having a go, personally. I know reviews are just opinions, but they are also public criticisms. Like a guy who just can’t make a girl cheat on her boyfriend (because I’ve been on the receiving end) I just can’t give a bad review for a book. Call it chickening out if you want, but look at this way… If the book is really crap why give it more air-time than it should have.

Good books are meant to be spoken about – and spoken about often. Crap books are meant to be forgotten.

So let’s forget about it, shall we?