Today we see that consistency is just as important as correctness. Maybe moreso.
What I gleaned about the stories: Ordinary people face the same level of horror as classic heroes, but lack the experience to deal with it.
Find this book on Amazon.
Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: The scene starts with the protagonist’s children toasting pop-tarts (with a hyphen), then one of them grabs a pop tart (without a hyphen). While Pop-Tart is the name of a trademarked product, so should be capitalised, enough people commonly use brand names for the wider class of things that the error didn’t flag. I potentially wouldn’t have bounced on the lack of a hyphen either. However, the use of one then the other in quick succession highlighted the words, so I glanced back a line to see if I had imagined a difference, then started actively considering which was correct.
Once I became aware I was considering the abstruse issues of diminution of trademark rather than the book in front of me, I moved on.
Analysis: Later in the collection, I encountered scary-looking. Previously Allen had followed the rule that adjectives ending in y don’t take a hyphen in a compound phrase, so this reignited my previous issue with hyphenation, turning a potentially obscure issue of trademark into a more general distrust of punctuation.
Analysis: Further in, I encountered the line “Better than eating dead cow. Or―old pussy.” An em-dash sets off a subsidiary clause or represents an interruption, neither of which applies here, so I stumbled to a halt trying to work out what stage business the dash was intended to indicate. I realised almost immediately it should be a pause, but had already lost my rhythm.
With three punctuation niggles, I pulled the plug.
Analysis: Each of the stories opened with a strong, realistic portrayal of a real person; and each of them was both different from the others and facing a plausible conflict.
Based on this, while I anticipate more issues with horizontal punctuation, I will be returning to this collection to finish the stories.
[Note from Jeff: I’m just popping in to give vigorous thumbs up to the cover design.]
Take the Pepsi Challenge: Want to know if my own writing measures up? Download one of these free short stories, in the format of your choice, and decide for yourself.
Just curious about your third WTF. If a dash cannot be used to suggest a pause, likewise ellipses – which indicate that words are missing – what would you propose should indicate a pause?
Ellipses can be used to indicate a pause; if I’ve written somewhere that they can’t, I mistyped myself.
I would contend with the second WTF charged. As I understand it, the rule against hyphenation would apply to adverbs ending in -ly, such as “the poorly dressed woman” or “the happily married couple,” and not adjectives as indicated above. If I were reading a book and encountered “a scary looking man” sans hyphenation, I’d question what a “looking man” is and wonder what makes him so scary.
Whereas, I wouldn’t be have an issue with parsing scary looking man.
Hyphenation appears to be one of those areas where there is a noticeable range of opinions between different branches of English and different style guides; from hyphenate except in certain narrow circumstances to only hyphenate if there is a high risk of confusion. I was taught not to hyphenate adjectival compounds containing a y ending, rather than adjectival compounds containing an adverb with a y ending, so that is the approach I unconsciously applied.
In this case, it was also the second time the hyphenation jumped out at me, so I noticed it more. Had I not been primed by the previous WTF, I might not have felt a big enough bump to notice the manner of hyphenating the compound.
Which demonstrates what IoD is about: does a book manage to hold the specific reviewer for 40 minutes?
Much like editing, I can only ever give my experience of the book. I report what didn’t seem right and why and leave it to readers to decide if they care, and authors to decide if they want to consider a change.
I sometimes think that the biggest hurdles most writers have to overcome are the “rules” they learned in school.
As for hyphenating compounds, my rule is “if it’s ambiguous, hyphenate.” Some readers may grumble that you’ve violated somebody’s rule, but you’ll never be accused of confusing prose.
I think ‘grumble’ is the key here. Did the hyphenation knock me out of the story? Yes. Did it take away all interest in reading on? No.
While we fail a book on the third WTF, that doesn’t make all failures equal. I certainly didn’t feel I was forcing myself to carry on after the WTF’s in a way I might for some plausibility issues.