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Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts, by Evan Ross Katz. Hachette Books, 2022
I was so happy when I saw this book on the New Books shelf at our library! A fan book on Buffy! I’m almost 70 but damn I love Buffy. But the book was not what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected, really, perhaps a look at how Buffy changed the TV world, how it changed its audience, something about the themes. That’s…. not what I got. The first part of the book is several chapters describing the seasons. This takes up a lot of space. Then he goes to some interviews, of cast and crew. Sadly, many of the main characters declined to be interviewed, so there is a lot of space given to interviews with secondary characters. Not that I mind knowing about the experience those actors had, I just thought it would have been nice to have a lot more about the leads. There is a chapter about the wardrobe, mainly Buffy’s, and of course a good deal of space is given to what a turd Joss Whedon turned out to be, and the paradox of him creating a cast with strong female leads, empowered to the max, and then being an abusive ass in real life, to the point that he wasn’t allowed to be alone in a room with Michelle Trachtenberg. Parts of the book are his personal memoir, slipped in there here and there. He’s definitely team Angel/Buffy, and down on people who are team Spike/Buffy because he found out that James Marsters used the style of a predatory man in a bar when Spike first started stalking Buffy. He seems to think that is Marsters personal way of living his life. Can you spell “acting”, Mr. Katz?
I was fairly disappointed. Parts of the book had me overwhelmed with details about things that weren’t central to what I thought the book would be about, while I was sad that there wasn’t more about the central cast. Sad that he never touches on how Buffy probably opened the way for other TV shows to give their female leads more empowerment. He writes about how he doesn’t think queer relationships are given enough screen time; for instance, how Willow and Tara don’t share a kiss until very late in the relationship. Meanwhile he sort of ignores how Willow and Tara are pretty much the first queer relationship on American TV (Queer as Folk notwithstanding).
I personally feel that Buffy went a good ways to normalize queer relationships on American TV, while Spike’s character proves that people- even those without a soul- can grow and change, just as Cordelia did earlier in the series. I loved that the primary cast were women who had male colleagues but not male saviors- they all saved each other.
The book needed a good edit. Not just for grammatical errors, but to reel in the sprawl of a book that went in multiple directions at once. I’ll give it four stars, I suppose, because while it was rough going it did deal with subjects I was passionate about.