Touched by Venom

Janine Cross

I have had the misfortune, by the end of the second month of 2006, to have come across some truly awful books. And yet not a single one of them has managed to cause me quite as much gastrointestinal distress as has Touched by Venom.

There are some books whose authors decide that the message that those books carry is more important than the way those books are written. They're wrong; how you tell the story is at least as important, in the most conservative estimate, as what you say. (I tend to take the more liberal view; I think how you tell the story is at least 90% of what's important. Obviously, at least a few people agree with me; look at the number of Academy Awards taken home by Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings as compared to that filmed by Ralph Bakshi. It's the same story; what makes one telling of it better than the other?) It's quite unfortunate that so many people can't seem to grasp this viewpoint, because until the public starts demanding quality writing, they're not going to get it. But I digress. There are some authors who understand this, and work on their style and the technical proficiencies that make reading great writing such a pleasure. What they have to say always manages to come out. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us so many years ago, accurately.

Then there are writers who believe that you, dear reader, are a fucking moron. They believe that if they don't hit you in the face with their message like it was a week-old dead haddock, you won't get it. And so the message is more important than the medium to these folks, and what you end up with is a manuscript that stinks like, well, you know. Authors like this should spring to mind immediately for everyone in the room, hopefully with shudders of dismay that you ever wasted your life reading such dreck.

And then, at the bottom of the heap, there is the singular talent of Janine Cross. I say it is a singular talent because, though she obviously belongs to the "message is more important than medium" camp, I'm relatively sure that even she had no idea what her message was when she was writing this novel. I have heard a few fans, critics, and blurbers refer to this as a work of feminist fiction. Tentatively, of course, because I don't think any of them know what Cross is on about, either. And I did see a few embryonic moves toward something that might have coalesced into a piece of feminist political screed masquerading as fiction, but those pieces never materialized into a whole. Or, for that matter, recognizable parts.

To put the cherry on top of this maggot and leech sundae, the jacket copy is a horrible travesty of jacket copy, breaking the one rule of ethics, morality, and etiquette in jacket copy: in order to find a hook in the novel, it had to travel way, way into the bowels of the novel. It tells you so much about what's going to happen in the novel that any flimsy attempts at foreshadowing Cross made in the first two hundred pages of this novel are shot by some copywriter making minimum wage who skimmed the novel while plastered one night. If you find that you must attempt to read this horrible miscarriage of a book, whatever you do, don't read the jacket copy until after you've decided to abandon it.

Because if you make it all the way through, you will be one of the very few people who has. Most of the rest are professional reviewers, and they get paid for it. What's your excuse?