Vampires: The Recent Undead by Paula Guran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
(I originally wrote this review on amazon.co.uk – edited slightly for here)
Some good, some bad, some dire – I purchased the audio version. Some of the stories were quite good, particularly those by authors that have a good track record in paranormal/urban fantasy. Some were simply verging on boring. And some were awful – I particularly hate when American authors try to “do English/British voice”. Really, if you haven’t spent years in the country, associating with locals, listening to them & properly understanding the words, stop bloody pretending. Here’s an example, straight from one of the stories in this collection: the word “wank”. The use throughout this story is simply that of someone who doesn’t understand it. In Britain, one does not call someone a “wank”, one uses the word “wanker”. The word “wank” is that of the act itself. It’s exactly as if the author had his characters call each other “a masturbate.” That particular story was not quite bad enough to make me stop reading the whole collection (which has happened with collections in the past, especially audiobooks where the narrator is equally as inept at pretending to be something other than American). I implore all writers who are not British/English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish (or, if they are, haven’t spent a great deal of time “at home”), if they sincerely wish to write in that way to find a few good alpha & beta readers who _are_ to correct such misuse of words/idioms/dialects. I equally implore all editors, if they too are not native to the country that the author attempts to portray, to please have someone who is to run through the story to check whether an native reader is going to throw the book at the wall screaming about “stupid, lazy writers” who should “stick to their own sodding language”. I’d offer my services, but I probably don’t have the diplomatic skills to deal with delicate writerly egos 😉
I have no doubt that Americans are equally pissed off by non-Americans trying & failing to recreate the US in their stories. Though I am guessing that the almost global pervasiveness of US culture means that it is easier to succeed with this than the other way ’round.
Warcraft, Books & Fibromyalgia 