10 Comments
User's avatar
Fleur Doidge's avatar

Yeah ... nah. The prose really, really isn't that bad. This reviewer sounds rather like one of the incels he/she attempts to skewer! Methinks you protest way too much. There's nothing wrong with varying your vocab, English being rich and strange, and all.

Eris's avatar

"varying your vocab" is very nice, if you can use it correctly -- some of these words aren't even the correct words

blake chernin's avatar

comparing a writer you don't like to an incel murderer for shock value (and to implicitly up the import of your review by linking it to The Big Issues) is hackery of the highest order. If you don't like something, just dislike it with your chest; you shouldn't need a bad-writing-is-evil frame to place around it that doesn't relate to or explicate the rest of the review at all. Now me personally I wouldn't trivialize anybody's extremely recent murder by using it as edgy-cutesy table setting for a review of a book that came out months ago but maybe that's why i'm not popular on substack

Eris's avatar

I'm allowed to make these jokes because an incel killed me

blake chernin's avatar

very deeply cool to double down on the edgelord thing about the murder that happened last month

Daniel Miller's avatar

I'm not really sure "imperative," "discombobulated," and "entanglement" are $5 words ?

Eris's avatar

Maybe $3 idk. Blandishment certainly is.

Daniel Miller's avatar

This one I agree with!

Josh Watkins's avatar

Another Eris heater. Glad to see all the weenies had their hands hovering over the buzzer to call you an "edgelord." Anybody who thinks Kitamura writes good prose needs to be thoroughly re-schooled, a la Billy Madison.

Coby's avatar

Wow, this post really left me in a state of delectation!