Today we see that deft writing can overcome a few distracting glitches.
What I gleaned about the stories: If you want to commit suicide without dying, plan your approach in advance.
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 first paragraph of the introduction was set with a line height of slightly greater than one and rendered in my ereader’s default typeface. However, the second paragraph was set with a line height of one and rendered in a different typeface. In addition to the visceral jolt caused by an unexpected change in the appearance of the text, it made me think that the book hadn’t been proofed after being compiled, the proof-reader hadn’t noticed, or the proof-reader had noticed but not cared; as each of these raised the spectre of a flawed reading experience, I moved on.
Analysis: The first story is about an illegal immigrant with little English and less understanding of modern Western society. The resulting confusion and rote behaviour are described in a manner that both feels real and provides the reader with sufficient frame-of-reference to understand what’s objectively happening. This balance between characters having a strong personality and stories being accessible is maintained throughout.
Analysis: A little way into the collection, the male protagonist of the story gets into a can-throwing fight with some youths. After a few ineffective salvoes, he describes being hit between the tit and the armpit. As he’d been described as male and there’d been a reminder of his maleness a couple of paragraphs earlier, I had an instant of disjunction between the image of an East End bloke (a la, Jason Statham or Ray Winston) and the image of prominent breasts that tit conjured. A moment later, my mind reparsed it as probably being slang.
Unfortunately, that instant of puzzlement was enough for the analytical part of my mind to get its boots on and raise another confusing thing: the pectorals end pretty much where the armpit starts so, sex notwithstanding, where is the bit between? Without the high level of accuracy, I’d have pictured the can hitting him just below the shoulder without even blinking, but with it my mind struggled to assemble the image.
After a quick glance on to confirm the precise point of impact wasn’t a vital plot point, I moved on.
Analysis: Where a character does or says something that seems absurd, foolish, or accidentally amusing, they act as if it’s a rational response to a rational world rather than a choice to be laughable. As people in real life rarely do things they know to be comical, and when they do it’s often in pursuit of a specific aim (entertain a child, demonstrate a disdain for authority, and so forth), this consistent indication that the humour is in the absurdity of life rather than a conscious veneer both prevents it feeling forced and draws upon the fear of being foolish that we all feel to make the jokes hit harder.
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.
After having a reading ‘toe stub’, I might or not keep reading. It depends on how far I’ve gotten into the story and how well the story has been constructed up to the WTF.
This article is an interesting approach to a book report and somewhat leaves me hanging. Do I want to read Peter’s collection or not? With so…. so many books and stories to read I’m not likely to carve out a bit of my life on a maybe. Already with a dozen books in the queue to read I even have to think twice about acquiring another collection or book when those I like and respect recommend highly a piece of work as worthwhile.
Perhaps, I’m missing the point. Maybe this is more an exercise about good and not so good writing than the stories presented in Peter’s collection. Hum…. If that is true. It works well.
With ImmerseOrDie Reports, our aim is not so much to write a “book report” as to take a cursory first glance at indie books and evaluate whether they hold our attention to a reasonable degree. If they do, we say so, and if not, we try to offer some insight as to why they didn’t.
As a result, we’ve created a rather extensive database for authors about what makes or breaks immersion, and as a by-product, we’ve found and championed a much smaller number of excellent books.
And the first step to reaching that “champion’s circle” is to survive the preliminary 40-minute test, as was the case here today.
As Jeff says, it’s about whether what we’ve read holds our attention.
One of the most frequent imperfections I hear from people recommending books to me is that it gets off to a bit of a slow start so you have to persevere for a bit. Which means that there are readers out there who have started those books, then put them down because they hadn’t had someone tell them it was going to become good after a few chapters. So, IoD provides some insight into what might make a reader give up before you’ve hooked them.