Neil Gaimen takes note of a couple reviews for his new one, The Graveyard Book:
The New York Times made it an Editor’s Choice, but not The Boston Globe, in the first example of Thumper’s “if you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything” motto book-reviewing I can remember. The entire review is:
“I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I’ll pass on without further comment.”
…which just left me wondering how something can be metaphorically ghastly. (“It was ghastly — and I mean that metaphorically!”) and concluding that Liz Rosenberg is probably trying to use metaphorically as the opposite of literally, whereas what she actually meant was that it was ghastly in several senses of the word (ie. filled with dead things and ghosts and she didn’t like it one little bit). Ah well. I hope she likes the next thing, whatever that is.
