Kind of sad

I was looking for information on Cormac McCarthy, whose name I had confused with Carson McCullers, when I found this four page rant against No Country for Old Men by a guy called Christopher Butler. He started off well and made me laugh but then spends three and a half pages complaining about really nothing; some stylistic choices by Mr. McCarthy.

He doesn't like the way the author isn't a slave to the hyphen or even the quote mark. Mr. McCarthy uses far too many ands, (something I'm equally guilty of, especially when I'm writing an action scene - from today's first draft an encounter between a character an unexpected bear -- It shook its head and roared and Nell threw caution to the wind and turned and ran like mad, heading back to the castle so quickly her eyes stung from the wind.) and commits other acts of writing fraud like refers to a coffee mug as a cup later on. (Isn't a mug also a cup? I mean really, you drink out of it, right? Do we know what the author meant? I'm pretty sure we do.)


Mr. Butler goes on and on, until I was dizzy, and then finally says :

Postscript: After writing the above, I discovered a forum at Amazon.com wherein many others express their dismay and disappointment at the way this book was written.

(Discovered? If we're going to nitpick about word choices is discovered really the right word? And did you really honestly have no idea that there were reviews at Amazon until some time after February of 2006?)

Then he says:

Annie Proulx in The Guardian is impressed by McCarthy's knowledge of guns, or at least his knowledge of gun names. In fact she lists them, and tells us that the stun-gun is for shooting out doorlocks. Well, it is — as a bonus. But then Ms. Proulx thinks that the word "minutiae" is singular.

Really? Really Mr. Butler? You find it necessary to insult not one, but two Pulitzer prize winning authors in one post?

By golly you must be one heck of a writer yourself. Where are the links to your own perfectly written, perfectly edited, perfectly wonderful, perfectly hyphenated and quoted prose? I'm saddened to say I couldn't find any, just some weird spam like the link about Raymond Chandler and Google that points back to the dreary little Cormac McCarthy diatribe, which is published on a website that makes money from aspiring authors by offering "editing services."

Even sadder is the fact that one of the authors on your "new authors" page is a new author only in the strictest sense, as, despite the presumed use of the editing services, they are self published, something they could have as easily accomplished without paying for said services.