i can't sleep so you're getting my los espookys retrospective thoughts. do NOT expect coherence or capital letters

( los espookys season 1 )

edit: finding out that julio torres wrote "wells for sensitive boys" makes me feel like raif efendi realizing he's talking to the woman who painted the madonna in a fur coat omfg. it was you all along .......... the artist who changed everything for me.......

I just found out Ocean Vuong has a second novel, which is one of those pieces of information that I have to assume I already learned and then unremembered until I stumbled onto it again, because it's been out since the spring. In learning this I ended up on the darkest place in the universe, the Goodreads review page! And naturally like any person on any review page I kept scrolling past all the kind reviews and lingering on the one star ones, making myself angry at people with woefully Incorrect Opinions on a book I haven't even read.

Realizing the hypocrisy of that led me to the review page for On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous because my opinion there actually holds some sway, instead of where it should have led me, which was Closing The Page (and my laptop while we're at it). And while On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous has a slightly better star rating than Emperor of Gladness, there are still many many one star reviews in there, calling the prose pretentious and purple and pointless and even some adjectives that don't start with a plosive.

Some go as far as to call Ocean Vuong everything that's wrong with the publishing industry; Some of them mourn the other voices that are being somehow silenced by the fact of Ocean Vuong having written a novel, which is such a bonkers argument I'm not entirely sure it isn't parody; Many of them are confessions that the reader just doesn't care for the style (one two star review reads simply: "is this is a good book ? maybe . but did i enjoy reading it ? no").

Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of the reviews are positive, and only around 1% are one star--I'm seeking those fuckers out on purpose in a sea of Incredibly Kind Things. Also, no one is obligated to like Ocean Vuong's writing. I really like novels that read like poetry, but I get why people are offput by them--asking whether poetry would've been a better medium for the work is a valid question, I think. It is purple, like, bruisingly purple. I can absolutely picture a version of myself who would roll my eyes at a book like this. Even after all the praise I gave it, I would give On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 4 stars, not 5--I don't think it's at all a perfect work.

At the same time, I do think it's absolutely bonkers to give a writer with as much baseline technical skill as Ocean Vuong a one star review in anything. In a way I'm sort of relieved by this whole experience; Everything in this world is disliked by someone. There is no universe where a book doesn't have a bad review. Even the 1% of bad that Ocean Vuong gets equates to literally thousands of people with a strong hatred for his work. 

And if Ocean Vuong isn't safe, there's no hope for any of us. Wanting to be universally liked, even just wanting to be considered "good," is a pipe dream. I think my biggest block in the editing process is that I'm doing so much for the sake of preempting an imagined negative reaction, but trying to write for the respect of a public that already dislikes you is so silly! The removal of bad does not equate to the addition of good. If you focus your energy on excising the bad parts, the end result can only be emptiness. 

So, like, moral of the story--numbers mean nothing, get over it, never open Goodreads again.