A review of Laura Ellen Joyce's The Luminol Reels begins:
The stories in Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels read like a series of inverse flashbulbs. There’s encroaching dark matter on every page, clouding the reader’s headspace with snapshots of autopsy, incest, coat hangers, and blood splatters.
I have no idea what any of this means. Presumably the reviewer wants to suggest the stories are "dark," but he would have been better advised just to say so straightforwardly and to move on to give some examples of the darkness in individual stories. Instead, he in effect tries to compete with the author under review in his ability to "write well." The result isn't good writing, it's hopelessly opaque and confused, and my immediate response is to stop reading the review.
I take a review like this to be symptomatic of a more general lack of familiarity with critical principles and terminology in current reviewing practices, and so we get in place of an attempt to describe the strategies the writer seems to be using, or to characterize the effects of those strategies, a resort to figurative language of a "colorful" sort, which seems to be the method of choice among too many reviewers who are themselves writers of fiction and poetry. Labored attempts at "creative" expression replace more rigorous criticism.
This reviewer would have been better off to begin the review where it now ends: "People are hurt over and over in The Luminol Reels but Joyce reminds readers that each person leaves behind a story. In a book built around crime scene photos, a happy ending is out of the question, but Joyce lets her readers walk away with a sense that telling and sharing these stories generates critical conversations about violence, religion, and gender." This is the first time I've been told anything about the book's structure and apparent ambitions, some discussion of which would surely help me to understand the book more usefully than the comparison to "inverse flashbulbs." If the concluding commentary now makes me more likely to seek out more information about this book, if not yet to decide I want to read it, it's despite the fact that up to this point in the review I haven't learned anything very specific about how the book works, only the reviewer's strained generalizations about it.
Although this is a "positive" review, if I were the author of the book I wouldn't be very happy with it, since it doesn't give the reader a very clear account of it at all. Real critical engagement with the book would be more important to me than hazily-expressed approval.
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