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WHAT DOES IT TAKE to be a shining new star in Hollywood these days? Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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The chapters vary in their length and quality, but cover topics such as the links between sex and death, fans of the show, individual characters and an impassionaed argument as to why Buffy should be going out with Wesley!
The chapters are not always postive toward the show, and there is some criticism of the last two seasons, but this is an interesting read for any fans of the show, or even just the casual viewer. It's a good starting point for any serious study of Buffy due to its readability, and, provided you can overlook the bias toward the character of Spike, worthy of a place on your bookshelf.
Another advantage of this collection is that just about every selection in the volume is excellent. I might want to differ with a couple, like the one that defends Riley as the best boyfriend for Buffy or the one that lavishes extensive praise on Tara (I don't dislike Tara, and loved her singing in "Once More, With Feeling," but I can't really get excited about her, either; I do, however, really dislike Riley, like a majority of Buffy fans), but even those take up positions that are fun to argue with. Some of the pieces are flat out outstanding, such as an early one that is cast as a essay question on a test in which a demon is asked to explain which is the most powerful force for good in Sunnydale and why (answer: Xander, with an interesting defense). In the other anthologies, there were essays I had to suffer through in order to get to others more to my liking. There isn't a clunker in the bunch here.
If I had a complaint--though I really don't--it would be that too many of the essays are fixated on the romance aspects of Buffy. I would estimate that well over half of the essays primarily are focused on one or more of the romances in the series. My own interests have always focused on the ethical aspects (e.g., did Spike's actions in Seasons 5 and 6 give him something like a soul before the shaman gave him one at the end of Season 6?, or on the extraordinary optimism that pervades the series that people can grow and become more than they are, that leopards can indeed change their spots), but clearly anyone who hates romance is not going to enjoy Buffy for very long. My lone complaint is that there isn't a bit more diversity of subject matter. There are just a few too many articles focusing on romance than I would have liked.
Still and all, this is a great, great book, and although I have frequently noted in other reviews that anthologies by their very nature are inconsistent and uneven, this one breaks that rule. It starts off great and stays that way all the way through. I can't imagine anyone with any interest in Buffy at all, not loving this collection.
That alone tells you something about the quality of Buffy The Vampire Slayer's writing. OK, sorry -- that's a hobby horse of mine. I wrote the article contending that this show is actually drawing television writing another step along the way to becoming Great Literature. Excerpts (with the publisher's special permission) of all the articles are in Writers In Residence at simegen dot com. Here is a list of the contributors. Use Amazon's new Search Inside feature by typing in each author's name without quotes around it. Once you see what they've been writing, you'll want to know what they think of Buffy The Vampire Slayer even if you haven't been watching the show.
Contributors in no particular order:
Peg Aloi, website Witch's Voice and poetry
David Brin, bestselling author of Kiln People
Margaret Carter, academic and author, The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography plus several novels.
Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, Author, Copper Moon and Bridge of Shadows
Jenny Crusie, bestselling author of Faking It and What the Lady Wants
Christie Golden, contributor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 1 and author, The Last Roundup
Charlaine Harris, author of the acclaimed Dead Until Dark and Club Dead
Nancy Holder, co-author, The Watcher's Guide and Angel: The Case Files
Sherrilyn Kenyon, author of the bestselling Dark Hunter series
Nancy Kilpatrick, Arthur Ellis Award-winner and author, Bloodlover
Marguerite Krause, author, Blind Vision
Justine Larbalestier, academic and author, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, author of the cult favorite Sime~Gen series
Jean Lorrah, winner of award-winning Blood Will Tell
Carla Montgomery, winner, Writers of the Future
Kevin Andrew Murphy, author of Fanthom: The World Below and Drum Into Silence
Laura Resnick, award-winning author of In Legend Born
Lawrence Watt-Evans, veteran fantasist and author, The Dragon Society
Michelle West, author of Sea of Sorrows
Scott Westerfield, author of the acclaimed Risen Empire
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, author of popular St. Germain vampire series
Sarah Zettel, author of Fool's War
Those points aside, this book seemed to endlessly repeat itself. The first time someone explained why Angel, Riley, and Spike were bad partners for Buffy, it was quasi-interesting. By the third or fourth times, it was a broken record. Each author might add a slightly different take, but it was all basically the same. The book is littered with many other repeated themes that make the book not as fun to read as it could have been. Also, with the exception of the introduction and the Xander Essay, this book can be very dry at times. This is a shame, because the humorous intro and Essay are over within the first 20 pages, and the rest can be dense at times.
The thing that really surprised me was how many small errors there were in this book. It really seemed like no one ever proof-read this book before sending it to the printers. One of my major beefs is an author who claimed to be a huge fan referring to Machida (the snake demon from Season 2's "Reptile Boy") as "Mikusa." This is just sloppy work, and a real fan would have taken the two seconds to look up the demon's name online if they weren't sure about it.
The bulk of the errors are in the numbering of the episodes, and the fact that episodes may be credited as happening at multiple times. Depending on what you read in the book, the episode "School Hard" was either episode 2-3(which it was), 2-5, or 2-15. And the "Becoming" episodes, which were episodes 2-21 and 2-22, happened either in the second season, the third season, or the sixth season. And one of the times "Becoming, Part One" was in the third season (3-21, it was called), Jenny Calendar was still alive (even though she died in 2-17...or as that author would have said, 3-17). And occasionally, it just seems that the author of a particular piece, and the (possibly invisible) proofreader were just lazy:
"The second-season finale is titled 'Becoming' (3-21, 3-22)..."
If you can get this book at a library, I won't try and dissuade you from checking it out, because it does have some interesting ideas and doesn't talk down to you. However, its redundancy and errors keep this from being a book I would even give 4 stars to.
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