Indirect Praise

ragbag:

bestriding literary boundaries

in 1979, harold bloom—perhaps the greatest literary critic of our time—decided to write a fantasy novel called the flight to lucifer. and not just any fantasy novel, one that was more or less pure fan-fiction. he has since disowned it and it is rumored that he continually mis-shelves the yale library copy of it so as to make it difficult to find.

asks the new york times:

The question was: could Harold Bloom…get away with a novel, a philosophical romance, an epic poem, an anti-Utopian fantasy having to do with an alien planet, a missing god, a second century A.D. Christian heresy, time travel, Lilith and the ever-popular conceit of the Quest?

answers an amazon reviewer

Ugh. This book is cast in the mythological prose of a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast. This is low quality fantasy. The real star of the book is Bloom’s eccentric philosophy of Gnosticism and no thought at all is given to characterization or euphony of language. I think Bloom is trying to write a new testament here, not a novel. He fails. This is an embarrassing piece of work.

i am left wondering how a dystopian potboiler by frank kermode would read. or what the cover of a steamy bodice-ripper by terry eagleton would look like.