Terry Prone: They’re fine, those book clubs, but there’s a niche for a different kind of endeavour

They provide a useful service for the insecure book buyer. Just seeing the books piled on tables at the front of the bookshop wearing their little flowery stickers provides something of a safety net: Buy this and you’ll be protected against the marauding possibility of challenging prose or boredom.

They’re fine, those book clubs, but I figure there’s a market niche for a different kind of endeavour. An anti-book club. This would work the opposite way to the “buy me” clubs. It would warn potential buyers off truly God-awful offerings.

Take thrillers. The first Scandi noir you read is dark and entertaining. 

By the 10th, you begin to wonder how Finland, Norway, and Sweden manage to get to the top of lists of happy countries when their fictional detectives are so miserably depressed, alcoholic, addicted, divorced, and possessed of children nastier than the average bear. 

A lot nastier.

How can these characters be out of kilter with the general northern European happiness level? 

And — honestly — can you face any more of them microwaving their grim dinners and fighting the need to get outside for a beer?

The American version of these losers is the guy (always a guy) forced out of his local police department by his own misplaced idealism and refusal to stage photo ops for the mob-funded mayor. 

He now does occasional private-eye work when he can stir his stumps to leave his trailer home, the distinguishing features of which are piles of dirty dishes in the sink and pizza boxes piled in a corner. 

(The northern European guys, for some reason, have higher domestic hygiene standards.)

Thrillers could also benefit from having a grid on the front cover establishing the book’s atrocity score. 

I don’t know about you, but I am good and tired of thrillers set somewhere almost boringly ordinary, like the Norfolk Broads, that end with seven people being exploded or incinerated or both by an internationally-led bunch of miscreants who nearly get away with it.

A graphic establishing the number of people violently killed in the final chapter would be a useful guide. As would a grid showing how many serial killers appear in the plot.

The fact is that serial killing is on the wane, but fiction has yet to catch up. Every second thriller has them in bunches. It’s practically buy one, get one free. 

Now, I can handle a serial killer, no bother. As long as they are singular. When they arrive in battalions, that’s a different kettle of killers.

It’s when a quiet village in somewhere like the Norfolk Broads has three operating simultaneously that I get the ick. 

Somewhere, there exists a natural law which holds that the more serial killers you have, the more the tension gets reduced. 

As — let’s be honest — does the probability.

If this proposed new book club can’t persuade publishers to put that data on the cover, members can at least take unilateral action by gently, respectfully, and briefly opening a book drawn from the Preferred Table.

Even one short inspection can reveal deadly warnings prompting the prospective purchaser to look elsewhere for their reading matter. It’s amazing, the phrases you can spot on a random glance.

You might think, for example, that encountering a description of a character as having “a messy bun” would not be lethal in its implications, but it is. 

For some reason, a book containing such a description is going to be a chick-lit dud. 

It may also include another giveaway, which is the portrayal of a character as “comfortable in their own skin,” which begs the question, who else’s skin are they going to inhabit?

The folks with the messy buns who are comfortable in their own skins also tend to wash down their meals with a good Malbec. Or Pinot Grigio. 

It’s not the wine type that’s the siren song of a literary dud. It’s the washing down. 

“Dinner was pasta carbonara, washed down with a Chardonnay.” 

Can there be a more disgusting way to recount food consumption than equating it with the old lobby in the song that needed to be washed down?

Worst of all, though, and the ultimate book-disqualifier, are the wandering eyes. I’m not going to name the book which belongs in the Guinness Book of Records for having more wandering eyes than any other.

It’s a current bestseller which shouldn’t be, and I’m going to eschew mentioning the title with difficulty, conscious that no writer has ever set out to deliver a novel worthy of ridicule, so let’s not name and blame. That said, you have to wonder how any line editor lets the eyes wander at will.

The first couple you spot are harmless enough. “I let my eyes drop as I waited.” 

In truth, eye-dropping is one way of filling in time when your lunch guest is going to be late or is slow, conversationally, when getting to the point. You could drop the eyes one at a time or — as this character does — together.

The book doesn’t record the bounciness of the eyes, but if they were like lava balls, those super-responsive children’s toys, the owner might get three or four bounces out of them before catching and replacing them where they belong.

The thing about eye-dropping or eye-wandering references, though, is that they’re nearly always a habit. 

Once a writer is happy in their own skin about travelling organs of sight, there’s no stopping them.

So this particular novel which shall be nameless offered multiple examples. Starting with the introductions.

“‘Call me Tyler,’ he instructed, and I shot up my eyes.” 

Now, this one is doubly precious in its positioning of another anti-book-club warning, which is, when you open the volume at random, a sentence about a character being called Anna or Cathy or Ben.

No, no no. They can be called Sweetie Pie or Turd Face, but their name is Anna, Cathy, or Ben. 

In this instance, the character should say: “My name is Tyler.”

The fact that he doesn’t is irritating but hardly merits the other character shooting up her own eyes.

On the other hand, Tyler has an eye problem, too.

“His eyes left mine and dropped down my body,” the main character tells the reader.

This follows an earlier incident where “I felt his eyes wash over my back.” 

Which in turn leads to action on her part.

“I turned my eyes out the window,” is the way she describes her response.

Now, if you’re a card-carrying member of my proposed new anti-book club, and you pick up a paperback of that kind, even three random finger searches will reveal a wandering eye or two. At which point you drop that one and move on.

In hope. Always hopeful, us readers.