Shiny Happy Critics

Cemetery Dance magazine recently ran an article by critic Paula Guran about reviewing horror books. In it, Guran talks about the tendency of horror critics to write almost exclusively positive reviews to the disservice of not only horror writers and horror readers, but the horror genre in general. She sees a couple of motivations for this tendency.

The first is a response to a former trend. "About ten years ago," Guran writes, "there seemed to be a lot of people who reviewed horror... who wrote negatively without providing back-up reasoning or example. Some were ignorant or at least did not know how to express themselves well. Some thought that part of their job was to find something wrong with anything they read. Some just liked being snarky because they thought that made them appear to be clever." Guran goes on to say that this trend disappeared because a "'support the genre' clarion was used to drown the negativity out." The current trend in horror criticism, she writes, "seems to be to never meet a book you don't like, to over-praise, and to be blind to obvious flaws."

Guran suspects that the second motivation for overly positive reviews is that "so many people who review are trying to advance their 'careers' as fiction writers."

You've probably already made the same connection that I did. As I read the article, I couldn't help but notice how the problem isn't unique to horror. Comics criticism also suffers from too many of what Guran calls "happy-smiley" reviews from critics wanting to either a) support the medium or b) eventually write comics themselves some day. Lord knows I've struggled with it.

With the help of people like Ed Cunard (God bless my personal Jiminy Cricket) I eventually decided that if I'm going to write reviews, I'm not doing myself any favors by doing it with ulterior motives. My job as a critic is to inform and entertain my readers. Period. It's not to support a medium or genre and it's REALLY not to further my writing career. There are better ways of doing both of those things.