Reddit reviews Blood Canticle (Vampire Chronicles)

This is ridiculous.

What happened was that a few years ago (wow, it's been almost ten already) is that lots of people read Anne Rice's latest book and hated it.



She comes back with a 1100 word paragraph. (A repost because I'm not digging through 44 pages of reviews to find the original)

As a (former) Anne fan...

She started alienating a lot of her fan base years ago. Memnoch started it, but I think the coup-de-gras was with Merrick. Her writing quality had deteriorated (lost her muse and tried to force out books? I dunno), she butchered beloved characters (literally and figuratively), and frankly a lot of her readers weren't into the overt religious themes.

At the same time there's a very active fan fiction community based around Anne's work starting around the time Memnoch came out. Basically, there'd been a fan fic community since the early days of the Internet. Around the time this book came out (or a little earlier): she sends cease and desist orders to authors.

Okay, the characters are her intellectual property, she has the right to do that. But it backfires. A lot of the fanfic was/is really good, some of the authors are professional writers. Second...how many authors do this to their fans? Not many, if any others. The main fanfic sites shut down, go underground (they still exist, you have to look for them though).

This whole time she's turning out books that her original, hard-core fans hate. What do people do on the Internet when they hate something? They give their opinion on it.

I honestly think Anne was not used to this, and took offense. And has her fan base (at least for her new work) has deteriorated over the years, the butt-hurt has just gotten worse. It's not bullying when someone in the public sphere puts out work, and gets criticism.

Do people take this criticism too far? Absolutely. There's a huge difference between saying "Your work was awful and here's why" to "Your work sucks and you should die". I also don't doubt that there are people who get obsessive about it. But this is more about Amazon and other sites not enforcing their own community guidelines when it coms to assholes than about authors being persecuted.

Spell cat by tara lain: https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Cat-Aloysius-Tales-Book-ebook/dp/B01MFXQ4BK

A brush with catastrophe: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XVJSSW7/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_8HGOzbAHQ2VCP

Cataclysmic shift: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075265BRC/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_KJGOzb2TKHJ3S

Mate hunt by amber kell: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E6F1I56/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_QKGOzbHPKC3EW

Pack of the panther: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HR03O7W/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_rNGOzbW5YHDRM

Blackwood farm by Anne rice: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375411992/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_xOGOzbZ59E2PP

Blood canticle Anne rice: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/037541200X/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=Z0599RE024PDP5FAW2YG#


Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head... there's a lot of them out there, some are better than others.