The thing about audiobooks…

If you get a craptacular narrator, the book loses a lot of its luster.

My collection of The Year’s Best fantasy and Horror, which I have been trying to work my way through since August, has such a man reading it. He’s British, and man does it show. I get the feeling he might actually live in the States (which is probably a sensible feeling given that I didn’t have this book lent to me from some British library), but still. The man sometimes overdoes it just a teeny tiny bit on the whole American accent. It sounds really hokey, for example, when he tries to do his impression of a redneck, and his knack for character voices is just… not there. I get the impression he’s a little bit better suited to nonfiction book narration, and I sort of wish they’d let him stick to that.

That’s not saying British people (of whom I have several on my friends list) shouldn’t read Audio books which will be listened to by Americans. It’s just that *this* British guy shouldn’t have read this particular book.