We have all done it. Ego surfing. Looking for ourselves on the internet. My misfortune is that I share a name with an established author who writes about UFOs and stuff, so most of ‘my’ results are about him. This is also why I have reinstated my full given name – Carl Peter Hough – to try to put some clear blue water between us in the digital marketplace. So, yeah, ego surfing. I was intrigued to see what kind of reach I had obtained organically, just by the internet doing its thing. My first surprise was not how invisible I remain. I expected that. No, the first surprise was to find an alleged used copy of my novel Pernkopf’s Atlas on sale on a German book website for €128,99. This is either some kind of scam or hoax, or through a quirk of either algorithm fail or poor human due diligence, they think my novel is actually a copy of Professor Eduard Pernkopf‘s Topographische Anatomie des Menschen, the medical textbook at the heart of my story. Whatever it is, it has my cover on it.
All that, however, is a diversion. My real aim was to check how books in a similar sort of vein were doing in terms of sales and reviews. I wish I hadn’t bothered. Using Pernkopf’s Atlas as a base, I checked out some recommendations based on a similar historical context (because my book is partly set in the immediate aftermath of WW2). My first observation is phrased as a rhetorical question: how many more books titled [The Something] of Auschwitz does the world need? I would never joke about nor diminish the horror of the death camps. I have been to Auschwitz. It is a bleak and crushingly depressing place that can only leave you questioning how humanity was lost to such an extent that such places were possible. Why then the glut of novels? Is our fascination with this horror never going to abate? I have read none of them, only a few blurbs and I can tell you this: they’re mostly uplifting tales of triumph against adversity. What a kick in the teeth for the actual survivors, or the surviving families of the millions who never triumphed against adversity: their horror is now handy literary set dressing. It’s not just me that has noticed either. Here is an article from The Jewish Chronicle on this very subject.
The spoiler is that my next project has a working title of The Panzer Commander and the Milkmaid.
Me
Worse than all of this is what can only be described as a niche sub-genre where persecuted young women triumph against adversity by taking their clothes off. I sampled one such text on Amazon. I won’t name the book. I struggled through the heavy-handed scene-setting (Paris, an impossibly lame-sounding and completely made up German military hierarchy) to find that even within the small allowance Amazon gives you to sample the text, our heroine found herself standing before a German officer and she’s already in her bra and panties.
And here’s the worst part. The number of 4 and 5 star reviews this abomination had garnered was shocking. Who the fuck are these people? And what are their ‘good book’ criteria? OK, I could take a guess that the heroine standing in front of the German officer in her bra and panties is probably one of them.
I’ll leave this with a recommendation and a spoiler: the recommendation is that if you like meticulously researched novels about this era, try The Dressmaker’s Gift or other books by Fiona Valpy. The spoiler is that my next project has a working title of The Panzer Commander and the Milkmaid*. You heard it here first.
[*already done, I know. Bonus point if you can remember the reference. Oh sod it, here it is.
