Spoiling for a Fight

I happened upon a set of reviews for a book that will remain nameless lest I should spoil the novel for you. It wasn’t the reviews which kept me reading, it was the venom in the responses. The first review was deemed to contain ‘spoilers’, those often tiny and seemingly inconsequential bits of information (‘until his death I…’ or, ‘I knew she should dump him from the start,’) which can ruin a fellow reader’s day. The strange thing is, I couldn’t see the spoiler in the review. I thought it a well-balanced piece of writing which had the power to persuade me to buy a piece of chic lit which only ever normally passes through my fingers long enough to wrap it up to give to my sister.

Not everyone agreed. The reviewer should be ‘banned from the site’. The reviewer has ‘ruined it for everyone’. She should even ‘examine her conscience’. One reader wished she’d never paid for, nor started reading the book although it did beg the question why she was perusing the reviews when she’d already made a start, particularly if she was someone who wouldn’t be interested in knowing which way the plot was going to go before she got there.

Later on, another comment appeared which thinly disguised that the main character had died. I had to smile, I was pretty sure this second reviewer was being a little mischievous. But, on cue, in came the tirade of disappointed bitterness. If there is a link between the total reviews and comments a story elicits and its sales, then this little-known book is going to be challenging Fifty Shades of Grey.

Through the whole debacle, I couldn’t help thinking that people don’t have to read reviews, just as there is an ‘off’ button on the television. I suggest that if a review has the potential to ruin their reading experience, that the potential book purchaser should stay away. Unless, like me, they have the memory of a fish.  

But it isn’t that simple.

If a review is to help us decide whether or not to buy and/or read a book, then we need to know whether we’ll like this author’s writing and whether the story is going to captivate us, make us laugh, cry, giggle or snore. And for that, a review has to include an element of the plot. But where is the line to be drawn between motivating a potential reader to buy the book and ruining it for them before they’ve even opened the cover? Does, ‘We join Paul on his journey to find the answers,’ pique our interest in the stories along the way, or make the need to read redundant knowing Paul makes the pilgrimage, either metaphysically or otherwise? Does, ‘When Sylvia meets her mother again, all is not quite what it seems,’ make us want to find out why not, or is it immaterial now that we know that Sylvia and her mother meet up?

I like to leave book reviews. In this quagmire of a publishing world, the least I can do to thank a writer who has given years of their life to the writing of a book which has captivated me for days, is to say so. Nonetheless, I live in complete fear of spoilers. Many sites do provide a ‘spoiler alert’ tag for the reviewer’s use and regardless of what I have written, I will always affix it to my piece. This isn’t because I think I have given anything away, I go to great lengths not to, but one man’s spoiler is another’s nugget of information and pleasing all of the people all of the time is rarely an attainable pursuit.

Some people positively seek spoilers. Search ‘spoilers’ on-line and a whole raft of websites dedicated to the art will appear because some viewers are clearly desperate for a spoiler of their favourite show. I’d like to know whether it’s to save them the bother of watching or because they just can’t bear the suspense. You only need to look at the news stands and scan the headlines for a nanosecond to know the essential plot lines for every Soap that week. I’m sure that the bigger the ‘spoil’ the higher the sales. Only because I belong to the brain of a fish category do I watch previews of films, entertaining as they are, their ‘spoiler alert’ button is nowhere to be seen. For the same reason I can, and do, look for reviews if I’m interested in a novel by an author who is new to me and I always read the blurb in a book shop, as well as the centre page, to help me decide. I don’t know if I'd be so keen if I still remembered the plot outlines by the time the book reached the top of my To Be Read pile. I won’t watch sport if I know the score, it isn’t the same without that feeling of anticipation. Maybe I'd have a greater sensitivity to spoilers if I had a reliable short term memory?

Do you read book reviews? Do they help your book buying experience or do they frustrate more often than they delight? How much would you like them to say? Please share!

Jackie
I post reviews at Goodreads, Amazon and in Chase, a bi-monthly magazine from the Rotherham Advertiser.