Today we see that adjectives have a proper ordering and sound wrong when that’s violated. [See here for details.]
What I gleaned about the stories: The tendency of teenagers to see any situation as life-threateningly important can be great enough that it applies to other people who are merely nearby.
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.
Note 2: The lower-case d in demonic is replicated on the cover and the Amazon listing so I decided it might be a deliberate choice (i.e. an inversion of the fantasy-capital technique) rather than an escaped typo and thus deserved the benefit of the doubt; however, it did mean I was going into the book needing to have my concern proved wrong.
Analysis: The first story opens with: “Get off! You’re really hurting me!” bellows the young mother from next door. High-pitched defiant banshee wails stream endlessly from her rebellious daughter. The exclamation marks convey shouting and the dialogue suggests negative emotion. So having the dialogue described as bellowed, a verb that means shouted and carries a possible negative emotional flavour, raised a flag that the author might not leave anything to my imagination (taking away the fun bit of fiction: the imaging of other worlds). The duplication of information in High-pitched defiant banshee wails made this flag wave so hard it fell off its pole.
After taking a moment to clear my image buffer of echoes, I moved on.
Analysis: When I clicked the contents link for the second story, my ereader opened on a full page of text with no title at the top. My immediate thought was that something had gone terribly wrong with navigation. However, almost immediately afterwards, I wondered whether the anchor had accidentally ended up at the end of the title paragraph rather than the start, so I flicked back a page. Another full page of text without a title.
Ficking forward again, past my original landing point, I discovered the start of the next story. However, my mental state had fully become that of someone having overcome an obstacle rather than that of a reader interested in the story, so I moved on—via a stop off toward the end of this story.
Analysis: The third story opens with: “Oh, she’s beautiful,” Susie gushed as she pulled back the pink, soft shawl from Maddie’s three-day-old baby girl’s face. I stumbled on pink, soft shawl: the traditional order of adjectives in English would be soft, pink shawl so the reversal triggered the editor in my mind; but the arrangement also didn’t sound right in my head, so distracted the part of me that likes the feel of prose too. Then I reached Maddie’s three-day-old baby girl’s face and stalled. Already holding the image of the shawl, my mind tried to parse the next description block in order: starting with the assumption of the simplest answer, Maddie became the putative shawl-wearer; then the assumption shifted to Maddie’s child being the shawl-wearer; then I received more information on the child, then still more. Struggling to put all the pieces together, the part of my mind that had initially wondered whether that lower-case d in the title carried vital nuance piped up: what if the description of the shawl was deliberately disharmonious. At which point the bits of mental image I thought were solid fell apart.
Lacking any trust the description would be accessible, 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.
