CRK: I suppose I’ve been writing since I was very young, but just stories for myself, things of that nature. I was a columnist for a couple of years in college. But I didn’t get serious about writing fiction until early in the summer of 1992. I’d spent most of the eighties in college and then working as a vertebrate paleontologist, studying fossil reptiles in Alabama and Colorado, but, by ‘89, the circumstances of my life had conspired to make a career in paleontology impractical. Impossible, really, and I spent two or three years without any real direction at all. I was working as a dancer, taking in typing, ghost-writing term papers for students, just about anything to make ends meet. I was taking too many drugs, drinking too much. Finally, I realized that I could either let things go on the way they were until there was nothing left of my life worth salvaging or I could pull myself together and find a new direction. After paleontology, writing was the only other thing that I could imagine myself doing with my life. So, in ‘92 I started working on my first novel and a year later I sold my first short story.

DT: Where was your first short story published? At what point did you realize, "Hey, I'm going to be successful at this?"

CRK: It was a science fiction story called “Persephone” and it was published in the March 1995 issue of a small press magazine called Aberrations. So it’s been a little more than four years now. But it wasn’t until after Silk sold in ‘97 and the thing with Vertigo became regular that I began to think of this as a way to pay the bills. So, I guess it was sometime in 1997.

DT: How did you get involved with DC/Vertigo, and The Dreaming?

CRK: This is probably the last time I’ll be able to tell this story without putting myself to sleep. In May 1996, Neil Gaiman asked if I’d be interested in doing one story arc for The Dreaming. We’d gotten to know each other after he accepted my short story, “Escape Artist,” for the prose anthology The Sandman: Book Of Dreams, a book based on his popular comic, The Sandman. At some point we’d talked about knives and because of that conversation, and because he liked my work, Neil thought I’d be a good choice for a Dreaming story about The Corinthian, so I ended up writing a three-part arc called “Souvenirs,” which came out in August ‘97. The Dreaming’s sales hadn’t been doing so well and I think “Souvenirs” must have been the first time a significant number of readers responded positively to the title. Anyway, the comic’s original editor, Alisa Kwitney, asked if I’d like to do a second story. Actually, she asked before “Souvenirs” was even released. So, I wrote another three-part arc called “Unkindness of One,” and for the first time since the comic’s debut, sales went up a little. I was asked to stick around to co-author The Dreaming with Peter Hogan, who’d also done a couple of stories for the title, and we did the “Many Mansions” arc together. Then Peter went off to work on stories for the new Sandman Presents title and I was asked to take the helm as The Dreaming’s only writer. Neil and I had been talking about the trouble the title was having and a lot of it seemed to stem from a lack of continuity, something we thought could be remedied if the original anthology format was abandoned altogether so that The Dreaming would have the same sort of month-to-month continuity that had worked for The Sandman. And I thought it was important that the story was told in a single voice. So I agreed to take on The Dreaming full time. So, basically, it’s all Neil’s fault.

DT: A lot of longtime Sandman fans refuse to read The Dreaming because "It's not Neil." Gaiman addressed this briefly in an introduction to one of the most recent issues of the comic. Do you have anything to say on the matter?

CRK: I wish I knew how to address this problem. It’s really very frustrating. Very, very frustrating, because these days so much of the time I spend writing is devoted to The Dreaming. I’ve heard a lot of the “It’s not Neil” commentary, mostly stuff online, but there isn’t much I can do to combat that sort of attitude. I write the best stories I can and hope that people will read them. Of course, the truth is that it’s not Neil, it’s me, and we have different voices. I do think that a lot of his fans who felt they were being loyal by avoiding The Dreaming are a little confused at his support of what I’m doing with the characters he created. It’s not like Vertigo was looking to screw Neil. He picked me to do this job and he reads each and every script. These are my stories, but they’re told with the utmost respect for The Sandman. I keeping saying this and Neil keeps saying this and if there are people who simply don’t want to listen, there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? But, on the bright side, The Dreaming’s sales are up and we’re starting to get a lot of positive feedback. We’re still Vertigo’s second best-selling monthly title and I think readers are coming back. I think they’re beginning to realize The Dreaming is never going to be The Sandman: The Next Generation, but that it can be something wonderful in its own right.

DT: The Dreaming used to be an anthology series played out in short story arcs. Why was the decision made to serialize the book?

CRK: I don’t think The Dreaming ever should have been an anthology. Vertigo readers don’t really seem to care much for the format. It was an interesting idea, but it just never took off. The results were uneven. Sometimes writers and artists were right on the mark and sometimes they were way, way off. And there was nothing holding the stories together, no focus to propel you from one arc to the next, which I think is pretty crucial to serial fiction.

DT: Let's talk about Silk. Did you expect the novel to do as well as it has? What expectations did you have for it before its publication?

CRK: I honestly never expected Silk to do as well as it has, no. When I finished the book I remember telling a friend that it was just too weird, that I was afraid it wouldn’t sell. I wrote Silk because I wanted to see if I could write a book that I liked and that was what kept me working on it, the twenty-eight months or so it took to write. So I’m very pleased with the response it’s received so far, and with the support it’s gotten from other authors. It still amazes me, how many people have believed in this book and helped it along.

DT: I met you in person in May at the Barnes & Noble presentation. As you know, I drove nearly two hours to get a signed copy of the novel. What's the most unique or bizarre experience you've had thus far with a fan, or a group of fans?

CRK: And I am very grateful that you drove so far. I did a signing in Athens, Georgia, where a girl drove all the way from North Carolina, something like five hours. It’s really incredibly flattering. I’ve been lucky, as far as readers go and I don’t guess I have any truly scary or bizarre stories yet. There was this guy stalking Poppy Z. Brite, Christa Faust and me for a while back in ‘96. He even showed up at the World Horror Convention in Niagara Falls that year because we were there. That was pretty creepy, but after a few weeks he narrowed his interest to Poppy. I think he must have finally died or something. He finally vanished. Let’s see. The people in the alt.books.cait-r-kiernan newsgroup have begun calling themselves “shrikes,” after a group of characters in  Silk, and that’s taken some getting used to. And a guy showed up at Dragon*Con this year dressed as Echo from The Dreaming. These sorts of things feel incredibly odd, but it’s a good sort of odd.

DT: I read somewhere that there was a Silk screenplay in the works at some point. What's the status of that, if any? If the novel were made into a film are there any particular performers you'd like to see in the lead roles?

CRK: I’d love to see Silk filmed, if it was handled right. I’ve done some work on a screenplay and there’s been interest from a number of people in LA, but nothing I can talk about yet. If the novel were made into a film, well, I think Christina Ricci would make the perfect Spyder Baxter and Fairuza Balk would be great as Robin. Sarah Polley as Daria Parker, Johnny Depp as Keith, Michael Wincott as Spyder’s father...this is such a fun game, isn’t it?

DT: Michael Wincott as Spyder's father is an interesting choice. I seem to remember some reference to Wincott in the letter column of one of your earlier issues of The Dreaming. Simply because I found them both to be utterly charming characters (in their own little way) would you care to offer up possible players for Mort and Theo? What about Niki? I absolutely love this game, by the way.

CRK: I’ve admired Michael Wincott since the first time I saw The Crow. He’s one of those perfectly marvelous actors with the knack for making the most unsavory characters incredibly sexy. But Mort and Theo. Let’s see. Theo should be someone with the wit and presence of Janeane Garofalo. Mort’s really difficult. I’ve never been able to think of anyone who could play Mort. Or Niki Ky, for that matter.

DT: What do you find harder; writing comic scripts, or prose?

CRK: Probably comic scripts, simply because it isn’t a situation where I’m left entirely to my own devices. My editors at Vertigo have a degree of input with The Dreaming and then there’s the fact that I have to write in script format. 90% of a script for The Dreaming is essentially “stage direction” for the artist, colorist, and letterer. It’s sort of like making a movie and I have to be director, screenwriter, art director, costume designer...which can be a lot of fun on the one hand, but doesn’t often feel much like writing. There’s something much purer about prose. I’d do nothing but short stories if it was economically feasible.

DT: How did The Girl Who Would be Death come about? Was it more enjoyable to work with your own characters than those belonging to the regular cast of The Dreaming?

CRK: Well, basically, when Neil ended The Sandman, he worked out a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” with Vertigo, that no one else would use any of The Endless, which is why they don’t appear in The Dreaming. After the success of Death: The High Cost Of Living and Death: The Time Of Your Life, DC wanted another Death mini-series, but Neil wasn’t ready to do another. Shelly Roeberg, who now edits The Dreaming, as well as The Invisibles, suggested a story about a cult that worships Death of The Endless, in which Death doesn’t actually appear. They took the idea to Neil and he said something like, “Only if you get Caitlín to write it.” So they brought the idea to me and I wrote a proposal, which went on to become The Girl Who Would Be Death. Was it more fun working with my own characters? Maybe. But I have an awful lot of fun with most of the characters from The Dreaming. I think the main difference was that in The Girl Who Would Be Death I was able to write characters who were more like the characters in my prose work and that was nice. The series is being collected as a trade paperback, by the way, and will be re-released by Vertigo sometime next year.

DT: Do you know if there will be any added features with the trade paperback? I still think the inclusion of one of Neil's scripts (including notes) with the Sandman: Dream Country TPBs was a wonderful bonus.

CRK: It’s too early to say. But I do agree that the little extras we got in The Sandman collections were great.

DT: It's my understanding that a novel written by you entitled The Five of Cups was never published. It was a story about vampires, if I'm not mistaken. Why wasn't it published?

CRK: That’s an awfully long story. Yes, the novel I began in the summer of ‘92 was a vampire novel called The Five of Cups. I wrote it in nine months in a really furious blur of words. It’s a very angry book, very violent, much different from Silk. Anyway, to make a long story short, my agent wanted me to tone the manuscript way down and I did try, without much success. I mean, it really was an unpleasant book full of unpleasant people — that was the whole point. Finally, I set The Five of Cups aside and began Silk. But in October ‘94 I was approached by the owner and publisher of Transylvania Press, who’d heard about the manuscript and wanted to see it. After he read it, he bought it and there were plans for a limited-edition hardback. But Transylvania Press began to have financial difficulties and the publication date kept getting pushed back. Then finally, in June ‘96, his option to publish the book expired and by then I’d finished Silk and I honestly didn’t like The Five of Cups anymore. Well, that’s putting it kindly. I looked back at the manuscript and it read like a first novel. When my agent was approached about renewing the contract I declined and put The Five of Cups away. Since then there’s been a lot of interest in it, from small presses and big publishers, but I’ve stuck to my original decision. Maybe someday, maybe, years and years from now, I could stand to see it published as a curiosity, as juvenilia, but not any time soon.

DT: Why was the decision made to produce Tales of Pain and Wonder? I've also heard that a new novel may be in the works. When will these two projects see the light of day?

CRK: Well, Barry Hoffman at Gauntlet Publications, a small press that has released limited editions of books and short story collections by people like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Peter Straub, and the same publisher that’s doing the limited hardback of Silk, wanted to work with me on a short story collection. Meisha Merlin Press had already released my chapbook, Candles For Elizabeth, and it was doing very well. So the next step was to put together a full-length, hardback collection of my short fiction. Most of the stories in Tales Of Pain And Wonder are interconnected, creating a sort of complex, loose narrative. The book will be released sometime early in 2000, with illustrations by a very talented Canadian artist named Richard Kirk (you can visit his website at www.wwdc.com/illustrator), and it’ll have an introduction by Douglas E. Winter and an afterword by Peter Straub. It's a big book, twenty-two stories, I think. Meisha Merlin Press will release a trade paperback edition in 2001. As for the next novel, it’s taking its own sweet time, much to the chagrin of my agent and editor. It’s called Trilobite and, like Silk, it’s set in Birmingham. But it’s going to be a while before it’s completed, mostly because The Dreaming takes so much of my time these days.

DT: Obviously, you want every consecutive work to be better than the last. Have there been any stories that have missed the mark, in your opinion?

CRK: I don’t know. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to me very often, because I’m so obsessive about not letting something out of my sight until I feel it’s absolutely perfect. There are a couple of Dreaming scripts I might like a second shot at, maybe the third part of “Unkindness of One,” which was The Dreaming #24, and maybe “Temporary Overflow,” which was The Dreaming #30. Maybe. There is something that occasionally happens with my short stories that I call “bad shopping cart syndrome.” You know those shopping carts with one bad wheel that never want to go where you’re trying to push them? It’s like that. I know where I want the story to go, but it seems determined to do something else altogether. But I’m learning that if I relax and let that one wobbly wheel do what it wants, everything usually works out fine. There’s something very Jungian about that, some part of the unconscious manifesting itself in the writing process, storytelling on a level just above or just below actual awareness.

DT: I'm surprised to hear that Trilobite will be set in Birmingham. I remember that I was a bit skeptical when I approached  Silk for the first time because of the fact that it was a horror novel set in Birmingham. I was pleasantly surprised with how the characters gelled with their environment. Did you decide to set Trilobite (and Silk, for that matter) in Birmingham for any particular reason other than the fact that you live in the city?

CRK: I’m most comfortable when I’m writing places I know. And I know Birmingham. For me, dark fantasy and weird fiction are about the intrusion of the Outside upon the Natural Order and how characters deal with this warping of their world. Sometimes the intrusion is really no more than the characters becoming aware that there are aspects of the world that they’ve never noticed before and when they do notice them they have to survive a sort of “existential shock.” So, why should Birmingham be any less appropriate for dark fantasy than New Orleans or Massachusetts or London? It isn’t. I think there’s a wealth of spookiness in Birmingham, and in the South in general. The land here and the cities and the people have history and we haven’t quite yet lost contact with our past, the way most of the country has under the onslaught of mass media McCulture. There are still ghosts here.

DT: Do you feel the need to turn out at least one major work a year (a la Stephen King, Anne Rice, John Grisham)? In the music industry, it is common for new artists to produce a large volume of music in a short period of time in fear that if they do not continually have an item on the charts they will fade into obscurity. As a writer, do you worry about the same possibility?

CRK: Absolutely. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to be prolific. And the more prolific you are, the more prolific you’re expected to be. My agent worries about me being a “one hit wonder” because I didn’t have another novel ready when Silk was released last May. But I think that’s really ridiculous and I haven’t made a secret about how I feel. This is why so many authors, especially those who are unfortunate enough to be pigeonholed as “genre” authors, produce second and third novels that fail to measure up to their first. I won’t write an inferior second novel. It has to be something that I think is better than Silk, or where’s the point? Fortunately, I do have the short story collection and all the comics stuff in the meantime, which helps keep my work in the public eye. But, still, it does scare me a lot. I just have to find ways to keep that fear from locking me up. I have to trust my own instincts, and I’ve never been particularly good at that.

DT: Back to Silk, what was your primary source of inspiration for the novel, and are any of the events or characters based upon real life events?

CRK:  Silk came out so differently than it started, it’s really hard to say that there was any single source of inspiration. It’s a little like a stew or gumbo, I guess. I wanted to write a book about a punk band set in Birmingham. I wanted to write a book about spiders and ghosts and a haunted house. I wanted to write about goth and insanity. I drew a lot from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and from books I’d been reading on comparative mythology, books on religion, books on quantum theory. All that’s in Silk and a whole lot more. And of course there are things in the book that were drawn from real-life experiences. That’s what writers do, isn’t it? They tell the stories that they’ve learned by being alive, all the day-to-day stuff, the things they’ve lived through, the people they’ve known, but dressed up as fantasy (or at least fictionalized) so that they won’t get sued. People who’ve lived in Birmingham since the eighties will recognize a lot of things in the book, like Dr. Jekyll’s. And the snowstorm that occurs about halfway through the book was based on the winter storm of ‘93, which left me stranded on top of Red Mountain for days without electricity.

DT: One or two of the situations in Silk have remained frozen in my mind since my first reading of the novel. The first would have to be Spyder's encounter with the jocks, and the second Walter's experience at the Greyhound station. In the case of the latter, I had been in what I believe to be that very same station less than two months before I read the novel. The familiarity of the environment made the tale all the more terrifying for me. In the jock scenario, I was able to relate to what was happening. There's a fair amount of bad blood between myself and many of my peers because of my decisions on a social level. For those of us who have been through similar experiences that particular part of the novel projected a sort of deja vu. Have you witnessed, or experienced firsthand, this sort of thing yourself?

CRK: I’m glad you liked the scene in the bus station. I hate that place. As for the jocks, well, yes, that was a scene that I’ve been through over and over. I’m queer and I’m goth and I live in the South, so it’s the sort of thing that’s become almost mundane. There was a time when I was naive enough to think that, because I’d survived elementary school and high school, that sort of thing was in the past. But I know now that it’s never going to be, because we have all these guys running around who are still living by the Sacred Code of the Playground, you know? So, on the one hand that scene was a way to work through some of my own anger at having to deal with the creeps, but, on the other, it was an opportunity to explore a different sort of intrusion of the Other upon the Natural Order. To those guys, Spyder and Robin and Byron are as unnatural and as threatening as any betentacled monster that Lovecraft ever dreamed up. People who are different *terrify* them, because their place in the scheme of things is threatened, and they know only one way of reacting to the unknown, to their fear of the unknown. They try to physically crush it. And I love the idea of the unknown biting them back every now and then.

DT: It seems as though sexuality is a major issue with today's reading public. Clive Barker's homosexuality, Poppy Z. Brite's numerous adventures (I had two husbands, she's a gay man trapped in a woman's body), and sexuality in general seems to be something that attracts a lot of attention. Do you feel as though sex, or sexuality, is an aspect of creativity? Does knowledge of an author's sexuality enhance the reading experience, and why is there such a curiosity about such issues?

CRK: These are questions that each author has to answer for him or herself. Certainly, so far as everyone’s sexuality, their gender, sexual orientation, and so forth, makes up who they are, as far as it contributes to their overall personality, it plays a role in every writer’s work. But that’s not to say it plays an overt role. Personally, I don’t find sex a particularly interesting thing to write about, so there isn’t much of it in my own work. And I don’t read an author because he or she is gay or transsexual or heterosexual. I read an author because I like what’s been written. The author’s sexuality is irrelevant to my interest in their work.

DT: Do you feel as though some authors use sex, or their own sexuality, to sell their product? It seems as though some authors prefer shock value over quality in some cases.

CRK: I think that, by saying that this is something each author has to deal with for themselves, I’ve answered this question already. I’ve made a point of not drawing attention to my sexuality, because I want to maintain that barrier of privacy for myself, as much as possible, but I won’t publicly pass judgment on people who’ve done otherwise.

DT: This isn't a follow up based upon one of your answers, but it is something I am genuinely curious about, and I believe our readers will be interested, too. There has been quite a bit of talk regarding the Columbine High School incident in Rant Magazine. I was wondering if you were contacted by the news media regarding the tragedy, and
how you feel a repeat of the situation could be averted in the future.

CRK: Yes, I was approached by the press the day after the shootings, by reporters claiming that they wanted to give me the chance to “tell the truth about goth.” And I declined, because I’m not very good under that sort of pressure and because I was pretty sure the whole thing had nothing to do with goth. A lot of us were approached. A friend of mine, Lisa Feuer from the band black tape for a blue girl, did a really wonderful job on CNN Live explaining what goth is and is not, that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had nothing whatsoever to do with goth. People like Lisa, with that sort of calm, that sort of composure under fire, amaze me. But, as for what can be done to avoid incidents like Columbine in the future, well, nobody seems to like my answers. I’ve opposed the private ownership of firearms for most of my life. Sure, guns didn’t lead to Klebold and Harris’ hatred of their fellow students. That was the result of the way they were treated by those students, and the way that the school system and other adults looked the other way. But the fact that we live in a country where high school kids can assemble a small arsenal, that’s what led to the killings. That’s what’s leading us to massacres that will make Littleton look tame by comparison. Columbine was a cultural wake-up call, a heads-up to a society that’s tearing itself apart at the most fundamental levels, but I’ve yet to see much evidence that anyone noticed. And those few who did notice are more interested in quick-fix nonsense than in facing the real problems.

DT: What scares Caitlín R. Kiernan?

CRK: I don’t have a lot of “irrational” fears, or phobias, whatever you like to call them. I think of them as little fears. Like being afraid of the dark or being afraid of spiders. I’ve been amazed at how many people, after reading Silk, have confessed to me a secret fear of spiders. But what am I afraid of? The future. That’s the biggest one. Sometimes I wish I could simply adopt the old punk “no future” outlook, but I can’t. We do have a future, I’m just afraid it’s not a terribly pleasant one. Someone recently called me a nihilist, thinking I wouldn’t be offended, and I was. I’m not a nihilist, or a cynic. I despise both, nihilism and cynicism. But I think that, at least since World War I, we’ve allowed ourselves, as a society, to slip so far down this well of self-destruction that it’s going to be a real bitch crawling back out again. Especially since nobody much seems to notice there’s anything wrong. So, yes, the future scares me most of all. The prospect of nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, the degree of environmental degradation, overpopulation, the disintegration of cultures, all these things that have already begun or that seem inevitable at this point. I know that answer will sound a bit hysterical to a lot of people, and that may be the scariest part of all.

DT: Do you think you'll ever reach a point, as a writer, where you say, "That's it. I have no more stories left to tell?" What drives you to keep writing? When you're working on so many projects, a new novel, a monthly comic book series, do you feel as though you will ever reach a point of
exhaustion?

CRK: That possibility is something that most writers are very frightened by, I believe. Coming to a point where you’ve said all you have to say, reaching that point before you’re old enough to feel like it’s time to stop. But I think it’ll be a while yet for me. And yes, working on so many disparate projects at once often leaves me feeling stretched very thin. Simply moving from prose to comics and back to prose and then back to comics, all in the space of a day, can leave me very disoriented. A few years ago, when I didn’t have deadlines, I could work on something until I was happy with it, with no fear of interruption. I’d start a short story, say, and then spend the next six weeks working on it. I spent three years on Silk. And so on. That luxury of time is very hard to come by these days, so I’m trying to learn to write better and faster, both at the same time. If it’s time to do a short story, I steal a few days from my work for Vertigo, a day here, a day there, and hide out until I’m done. That sort of pressure seems very much at odds with good writing. But it’s what’s demanded of those who intend to make their livings as writers today. Which is probably why there’s so much crap on the shelves. One of the important keys to not being overwhelmed is learning to say no. For new writers it’s so flattering when you reach that level where a lot of people start asking for stories that, at first, you want to say “yes” to all of the offers, just because someone is asking you to write for them and you know that the days of rejection slips are finally over. So you wind up with a mountain of deadlines that three writers couldn’t meet. But the last year I’ve gotten a lot better at saying no.

DT: One hundred years from now how would you like your work to be viewed? Some of the writers that you have been compared to, either in style or content, include William Faulkner and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Both of them have a near-immortal status in the world of literature. Do you aspire to that level of success?

CRK: If an author tells you they don’t want to be read in a hundred years, they’re lying. That’s one of the attractions, grabbing a little bit of immortality. But it’s very important not to become focused on that part of it. It’s something that you can hope for, somewhere in the back of your mind, but if you spend much time thinking about it, consciously worrying over it, it’ll lock you up. Most writers, good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, are forgotten. That’s just how it is. It doesn’t hurt to hope, though. So, sure, I hope that in 2099 someone’s still reading my stories. Actually, I’d be happy just to know that there will be people in 2099 who can read anything at all.

DT: What other mediums would you like to explore as a writer? You've done comics, and you've had dozens of short stories published. Silk was a highly commended debut novel. What other roads would you like to travel?

CRK: More than any other, film. And I want to get back to my music one day. I miss doing music a lot, and I especially miss performing. It’d be nice to write non-fiction someday, perhaps a book on Victorian paleontology, something like that. There are a lot of “roads” left that I’d like to explore.
 

Note: The following question did not appear in the published Rant interview.
 

DT: You've complained frequently about Amazon.com's review system. Explain what has happened, both to you and others, and why it is such an issue.

CRK: Well, actually I think I’ve only complained publicly once or twice. But, whatever. My problem with the “review” feature at Amazon is two-fold. First, I strongly believe that book reviews should be written by people who understand something about the structure, theory, process, and history of literature, people with *informed* opinions. Reviews should be carefully reasoned and carefully composed, they should maintain as great a degree of objectivity as possible, and a reviewer has a moral obligation to stand behind what he or she has written. Reviews should *never* be anonymous. On Amazon (and, for that matter, on BarnesandNoble.com), we have this weird public forum where every voice is given equal weight, no matter how illiterate or malicious the voice in question might be. For instance, look at reviews of classics like Slaughterhouse Five or The Scarlet Letter and you’ll find what’s obviously the commentary of high school and junior high school students who’re pissed off at their lit teachers and trying to get even by publicly trashing their homework assignment. There’s virtually never anything of critical merit posted. It’s just junk, white noise, a silly little lie that Amazon uses as a gimmick to attract customers by trying to cash in on the image of the internet as a bastion of egalitarianism. Secondly, I think it’s more than a little odd and counterproductive that Amazon uses these “reviews” to compute their five-star ratings for the books they’re selling. That’s like going into a bookstore where customers have been allowed to hang banners around the books praising or panning them. It’s absolutely unimaginable, from a retail standpoint, that such a thing would ever happen. But here it is on Amazon. Kids who are flunking freshman English, who cannot spell or be bothered with punctuation, much less literary analysis, are allowed to rate books they often admit they don’t understand. And then their rating affects the book’s overall rating, which, at least in theory, will affect how well the book sells. Moreover, as the system stands, there’s absolutely nothing to prevent “reviewers” from posing as authors — this is actually happening. Christ, I could go on about this all day.