It's been almost a week since Glenn Beck's “factional” novel, The Overton Window, made its debut, and in that time it has earned near-universal critical disparagement. The Washington Post, Time, and the Daily Beast gave the book a solid thrashing. And, for what it's worth, I personally found the book to be lethally awful. There has been one notable exception to the chorus of boos -- Mediaite's Steve Krakauer, who just can't seem to get enough of The Overton Window.

Krakauer is spearheading what's being billed as Mediaite's "100-part review" of the Glenn Beck non-thriller. Why 100 parts? Presumably because ideas always sound better on paper. They're up to part seven, so at this rate the whole thing will be done some time in September.

Most of the seven parts have been authored by Krakauer, and they include a fawning review of the book (“persuasive writing”), an online scavenger hunt (“Homework!”), and today's installment, in which Krakauer comes off as rather fanboy-ish by casting The Overton Window movie (“it almost feels like the book was written with scenes in mind”). The whole enterprise was kicked off with an exclusive interview with Beck, in which Krakauer and his colleagues tried to nail down which Overton Window character most resembled the author.

Krakauer is of course entitled to his opinion, and if he likes the book, well... to each their own. The complicating factor here is that Krakauer is, I think, a journalist. He boasts the title “TV editor” and he certainly writes and acts like a media reporter. But the content he's produced on The Overton Window reads more like a series of Glenn Beck-approved press releases than it does analysis. I mean really -- how does musing on whether Eliot Spitzer would play himself in The Overton Window movie (that doesn't exist) merit inclusion in a “review” of the book?

I guess if the review is 100 parts long, then some room can be made for Tiger Beat-esque dalliances like that, but we haven't received much else from Krakauer thus far, and they still have 93 parts to go.