Speak Nothing but Good of the Dead

 

I don't like to write bad reviews.  They serve a purpose  but somebody else can do that work, thank you very much.  There is a reason that every week I review the best short story I read.  What would be the point of attacking a story which will probably be gone from memory in a month or two?

I bring this up because of a novel I read recently.  It is actually a good book and I will probably say some nice things about it at a later day.

But, boy, is the text a mess.  I am talking about the Olympic prize for typos.  

A friend had warned me in advance so I actually started counting them from the beginning.  I counted 114 errors in 296 pages.  That's a typo every 2.6 pages.  And I was being conservative.  For example, when two characters spoke in the same paragraph ("Hello," Larry said. "Hi," Barry said.") I didn't count it.  

But what kind of goofs were there? Well, there were the typical homonyms that Spellcheck can't catch (you/you're, vile/vial, etc.) Once or twice a character changed their name and then changed back.  But what really freaked me out was a brand new type of typo, one that was clearly connected to a glitch in some automated system.  Look at the box to see an example I made up.

See what happened?  What I assume was an editing program occasionally and randomly decided that a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence indicated a new paragraph.  Rather disturbing.

Now, I am happy to say that the author of the novel got the rights back and has found  a different  publisher.  I trust the new edition will be a lot cleaner.  

I am not going to name the author or the book but I did intend to mention the publisher. I see no need to protect them.  But as it turns out they went out of business last year, so we go back to the title of this piece.

So let me wish you all typo-free reading and publication.