6.17.2010

Throwing Rocks at the Wastelands

Allen Houston, in his article "Neil Gaiman: Vampires and Werewolves Don't Belong in the Literary Ghetto," writes a remarkably shallow and juvenile blurb in chronicling an NYC reading by a number of the finest storytellers writing fiction today.

We're talking, among others, Walter Mosley and Jeffrey Ford here. These two writers have charted territory in the world of letters that will always belong to the greater atlas of creativity.

He denigrates an entire audience with hackneyed stereotypes, saying the "balding Goths, girls with jutting chins and faux punks were so reverent that I could hear the hum of the air conditioner."

Sheesh. Yeah, those are the only folks who dig books like Stories.

This isn't a review; instead, it's just another sloppy hatchet job on commercially popular writers (I sincerely doubt that there was any "belly-aching" from this group...) that trots out that old distinction between genre dreck and literature.

Quality is quality is quality, by the way.

Reading stuff like this makes me thankful that I make my home in the speculative arts...

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