Sarah's Library

6/12 - It's funny the things you notice when reading a teenage book as an adult.  I haven't read this in at least ten years, maybe longer, and the last time I read it I probably would have given it five stars.  This time around there are some niggling annoyances - not the best editing in the world (also not the worst) and (possibly even worse) some stilted, awkward dialogue - neither of which I noticed at all when I was 16...17...18 (or whenever it was).  When I read this last time I thought it was a fantastic book, with the characters exactly as they were on tv, exactly as Joss Whedon imagined them.  But reading it over the last few days I've noticed that Buffy's dialogue is trying very hard to live up to the show's writers, but not quite making it - her mid demon-killing quips are just not funny like they should be.  Also the demons they've fought, so far, have been so outlandish, so far from what they fought in the show that I'm getting quite annoyed with how far the authors are taking their self-imposed mission to write the weirdest Buffy demons ever.  It's like reading Lovecraft's description for the Elder Ones, where the description goes on for, what seems like, a never-ending paragraph that's all one sentence with lots of commas.  Even after reading the description more than once I really can't get a fix on what Buffy (or Lovecraft's) demons are supposed to look like (while reading Lovecraft I googled Shoggoths and the Elder Ones and found many conflicting drawings of both creatures, which was only minimally helpful).  I'll be reading the paragraph following the description paragraph, where Buffy and the demon are fighting and suddenly the demon will do something violent with an appendage that seems to have come out of thin air, this confusion sends me back to the description paragraph to re-read it and try once again to get a handle on the demon's looks.  This re-reading does not an easy, flowing book make.  To be continued...