Today we see that an error can hit harder if readers think you aren’t the sort of author who’d make it.
What I gleaned about the stories: The protagonists of horror stories sometimes start with an almost divine sense of their own worth.
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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.
Note: The font size of the front matter is noticeably larger than the font size of the body text. As a result, I’d scaled my ereader’s display size down to avoid the sense of a large print book, then had to scale it up again when I hit the first story. While I didn’t score a WTF for this, it did make me wary.
Analysis: The first story opens with: When Jacob saw it standing up against the side of a building on Stark Ave. He gave it a glance and nearly walked on by. My mind parsed ‘full stop capital letter’ as a sentence break, so attempted to make a full sentence out of the first clause and failed. An instant later, I realised the first full stop should have been a comma and the capital H was no doubt an artefact of a word processor’s auto-correct feature.
An obvious error like this in the first sentence always raises a strong concern over whether the book has been proofed. Faith shaken, I moved on.
Analysis: The second story opens with the protagonist watching a family move in next door. A couple of sentences in, I encountered: A man and a woman, and a girl who Robert assumed was their daughter, made trips back and forth…. The placing of the girl in a subclause rather than listing all three people together implied a sense of division: that the new owners were a couple and that their daughter had come to help them unload. A few sentences later, the narrator was revealed to be a teenager and the girl estimated to be a couple of years younger, whereupon my mental model broke because a girl of about thirteen would be part of the family unit rather than just helping. A moment later, I concluded the use of a subclause was intended to support the assumption that the girl was their daughter; however, the default parsing of man, woman, and girl would be a family unit, so—even if justifable grammatically—the sentence had confused me without adding any useful information.
I therefore moved on.
Analysis: The third story opened with the protagonist talking to the audience in a conversational style that made me think that this author had a good grasp of first-person narration. Unfortunately, this meant that the multiple uses of I in the third paragraph (sometimes two or three in a sentence) not only created an annoying echo but also left me feeling cheated.
Without sufficient trust this paragraph was an aberration, I pulled the plug.
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.
