I try to avoid reading books out of order, and while it usually wouldn’t matter in this case, my having read Five Seasons of Angel before this one brings a couple of things to mind… the foremost being that while editor Glenn Yeffeth obtained fewer essays for the Angel collection, he also seems to have obtained more highly engaging essays for the it than for the Buffy collection. While that may sound like a minor slam of the Buffy collection, it’s not… it’s a big time golf-clap salute.
To me, it means that response to the Buffy collection was so strong that he was able to entice the true die-hard Angel fans from the writer’s community to submit high quality material. That result alone makes me giddy just thinking about what he’s collecting for the upcoming Firefly collection.
There are 22 essays in Seven Seasons of Buffy, plus a foreward by Drew Goddard, and most of them are strong, or strongly convincing in presenting their views. One of my favorite essays is also the funniest, “Is That Your Final Answer?” by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, which is a long form university style final exam series of essay answers by a student trainee demon, and while “The Search for Spike’s Balls” by Sherrilyn Kenyon runs a close second for funniest, it’s hands-down the winner in the snarky category.
Other favorites are “Dating Death” by Jennifer Crusie, who explains why Buffy is one of the great romance tales of our time; “The Meaning of Buffy” by Marguerite Krause, who explains it all to us; “When Did the Scoobies become Insiders?” by Sarah Zettel, who shows us how the gang progressed from being the outcasts to being the crew in the know, and why that may have adversely affected the final two seasons; “A World Without Shrimp” by Margaret L. Carter, which examines the delicate fabric separating the alternate realities and universes we’ve seen in the show; and “The Power of Becoming” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, on whether or not Buffy qualifies as Great Literature, and some of the reasons why she thinks it does.
I think my one small nit is that 8 out of the 22 essays were about sex and the love lives seen on the show. Seeing the theme talked about that much in one collection started to get repetitive, even though they were well done and from different perspectives. Buffyverse addicts are aware of the “doom” of the Scoobies having healthy, long-term relationships while they live on the Hellmouth, and the both painful and humorous results of the ones they tried to engage in. I guess personally I would have liked to have seen a little more topic diversity, but I can settle for hoping for a second volume.
Still, it’s a highly recommended read for any Buffyverse fan.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Seven Seasons of Buffy edited by Glenn Yeffeth
Published by: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1-932100-08-3
Genre: Television
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