Editorial meeting of Bryant Reviews Ltd
Topic : book 1, Millennium series

- Is everyone here?
- We should start anyway.
- Okay, well, we have to figure out how to review this damned Dragon Tattoo book. The problem is, everyone and his dog has already reviewed it, and seen the movie. Movies. What’s left to say?
- Well, you could say the same thing about Dickens.
- All due respect, Larsson is not no Dickens.
- True dat.
- True dat? Who are you, gangsta-reviewer?
- What about the sandwiches and coffee?
- ?
- You know, you could do a kind of parody, might be funny…
- It’s been done! Haven’t you read Joel’s review?
- Done!
- Done done done!
- Also, really, there weren’t that many sandwiches. I counted, there were 7. It’s a bit of a myth.
- That’s 7 more than most sane novelists describe in their novels. I bet you could scour the works of Henry James and not find a single sniff of a sandwich.
- That’s cause they only eat ptarmigan’s brains on a bed of rocket leaves in Henry James.
- What about the blatant product placement? I mean, I assume that’s what this is.
- Product placement in a novel? Can you do that?
- Well, listen to this bit :

She set her sights on the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 megs of R.A.M and a sixty-gig hard drive. It had Blue-Tooth and built-in CD and DVD burners. Page 202.

- Yep, that has to be product placement. It’s like right out of a sales brochure. Outrageous really.
- So did anyone like this thing?
- Oh sure. It was kind of okay.
- Okay?
- It’s a thriller, you know, it’s not A la recherché du Temps Tattoo. Also, it’s a serial killer thriller, where the victims are females chopped up in various horrible ways. So it’s a completely ordinary thriller. They say shit like “But for you I would be dead!” and “This can’t be brushed under the carpet!” and “Get out of my house this minute!”

(General laughter)

- What about Salamander?
- It’s Salander.
- Oh yeah, I did that too. Every time it said Salander I thought it said salamander, it was so crazy.
- She was a bit off the peg, didn’t you think?
- Yeah, it was like a central casting “hip edgy young female character”.
- I liked her.
- Everyone likes her. Okay, except you. You too? Okay, vote – who liked her? Okay, that’s three who did, so the rest of you didn’t. All right then, we’ll take a contrarian position on Salander. We’ll say, oh, I don’t know, utterly implausible, Manga cartoon, middle-aged guy’s fantasy girlfriend, the goth version of the manic dream pixie girl, you know, that kind of stuff.
- Agreed.
- What about the plot?
- It was just a big fat thriller so it had a big fat villain who was completely silly and an exciting denouement which I’ve been more excited going through a tunnel in a train to be brutally honest.
- Anybody else?
- Er… I felt slightly tense. Once.
- Oh, and did you notice it took like 80 pages to splutter into life and then another 50 pages after the story ended to wind down and go to sleep?
- Well look, there’s a deadline here, this review has to be done by Tuesday evening. Any volunteers?
- ….
- ….
- I’ll do it then
- Hey, thanks. And as your reward… you don’t have to read The Emo who Played with Fire or The Emo who Fucked Up the Beehive.
- Okay, I appreciate that.
- The rest of you watch it… I see any review slackness and Emo with the Beehive is coming right at you.

(General catcalling and ribaldry)

- Meeting adjourned.