Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Book lovers never die; they just get carried away by a story.”

You may never have heard of her, but in the publishing world, Harriet Klausner was legendary.

This week, she passed away, aged only 63.

Harriet Klausner was the uncontested Queen of Book Reviews. A speed reader who easily consumed four to six novels a day, she was (and remains) Amazon’s #1 Hall of Fame reviewer, with over 31,000 reviews to her credit.

In 2006 (when she had only written around 13,000 reviews), Time Magazine listed her as one of the year’s most influential people. “Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made.”

Indeed.

I first encountered Harriet in 2001, with the debut of my first novel. She gave The Year the Cloud Fell a glowing review, and I was thrilled. I contacted her to express my gratitude and she replied. She said she simply loved books, loved reading, and loved giving new authors a good review. She never reviewed books she didn’t like, she told me; judging by the sheer quantity of her output, she liked a lot of what she read. Eventually, she reviewed all of my Roc-published books, giving them all 4–5 star ratings (just like everyone else).

My impression of her, based on our brief correspondence, was of a shy, humble, solitary, wan (almost ashen-faced) former librarian. I imagined her alone in her one-room walk-up, crocheted antimacassar on the overstuffed chair in which she sat, book in one hand, cigarette in the other, sunlight streaming through the smoke and drifting cat hair.

In reality, she was a machine. Publishers sent her up to fifty books each week, and she read between 20–30 of them. Then she would sit down and write a review of each book. Four to six books a day, every day, for fifteen-plus years, all the way up to just a few days before she died.

That is not lonely-cat-lady stuff. That is sheer and formidable efficiency.

And she did it all for the love of books.

There are those who insist that she was a paid shill for the publishing industry, as her reviews showed up the day of (or a day before) a book’s release date, but this comes from people who don’t understand the publishing industry. Publisher’s sent Harriet advance copies of the books, precisely so she could read and review them before the release date. Others claimed that she never actually existed (or was just a front) because all her reviews followed the same format—a paragraph of synopsis plus two more paragraphs of commentary and opinion—but these were artifacts of her process, not evidence that she didn’t exist.

Granted, Harriet’s speed-reading techniques often led her to miss and misstate things. Many of her synopses were inaccurate—she really messed up on the synopsis for my fourth book, citing plot events that just plain weren’t there—but so what? How is that different from the reviewer who whinged about the third book in my Fallen Cloud Saga, his complaint being that this third volume wasn’t the first volume? Citizen reviewers get things wrong all the time, but what Harriet always got right was what she liked about a book. Characters. Plot twists. Setting. The details of it all were just details; what she loved was the world each book created for her.

Her tastes were decidedly plebeian, favoring genre fiction above literary works. One item on her To Do list was to read every vampire book ever written. That alone would be a daunting prospect (and personally, I’d rather have hot nails shoved in my ears) but if anyone could do it, it was Harriet. I hope she did.

Complaints, conspiracies, and castigation can all be put aside. The publishing world has lost a real lover of books, and a real champion of authors and the art of writing.

Godspeed, Harriet.

k

PS. Here are links to Amazon’s Memorial to Harriet, and the Amazon Book Review‘s obituary.