The Goodreads Best Books of 2013 Semifinal Round has been announced, and it looks like a lot of the bullshit has been shaken out of the nominations. Except in Horror, of course, but that’s nothing new.
Now that the write-in period of the Goodreads Best Books of 2013 Award is over, I can say this. Watching authors grub for votes, even if camouflaged in self-deprecating humor, has been disgusting. Have some dignity and some faith in your work. Vote grubbing is exactly the reason open voting awards on the Internet don’t carry any weight. They’re rigged from the start to favor whoever can cajole the most Internet followers into voting for them. This results in terrible books winning, which in turn results in the award becoming a meaningless joke.
Essential Tomb of Dracula, Vol. 1 by Marv Wolfman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There are a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t have liked this collection. It’s extremely text heavy for a comic. The plots are repetitive. The prose is ultra-purple. Characters needlessly narrate in dialogue the action that’s happening right there in the panel. Blade, one of only two main characters of color, speaks mostly in jive. The other, Taj, doesn’t speak at all. And yet…I kind of loved it. There’s an unintentional campiness to the pervasive gothic atmosphere that I very much enjoyed. It’s worth a look if you can get past its shortcomings. It definitely made for some fun Halloweentime reading.
