Today we see that distracting formatting can prevent a reader from even remembering your prose.
What I gleaned about the stories: True evil is not raised to brush its teeth before it goes to bed.
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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.
Analysis: The second line of the copyright statement begins: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced…. The emboldening caught my eye (as setting text in bold is intended to do); immediately my mind sought meaning for the emphasis: the use of publication to describe a book is standard, so it couldn’t be highlighting that the scope of the statement was broader than usual; there was no indication of connected matter, so it wasn’t clarifying that some other work that might be assumed copyrighted wasn’t; and—whereas there is some room for redefining words in speculative fiction—a legal declaration is not a place for ambiguity or invention.
And, even had it somehow been formatted accidentally, it stood out enough that a proof-reader would have caught it easily.
Whether it was a failed (and poorly chosen) attempt to convey something other than the plain meaning of the words, a failure of proofing, or a combination of both, it didn’t bode well for the fluidity of the forthcoming prose.
Cautiously, I moved on.
Analysis: The introduction (and all body text) is set with a 2-2.5 em indent and three lines of white-space between each paragraph. This turned my normally unconscious saccade into something closer to repeatedly leaping a pit then grabbing for the edge. While I can recall having read the first half of the page, this formatting choice was overpowering enough that I had no memory of what the words said.
Limbering up, mentally, for more jumps, I moved on.
Analysis: The first story opens with a character recalling a repeated nightmare they experienced as a child. The focus on small details (such as the shape of a tongue) and visceral metaphors (such as being raped by a smell) both dragged me into the experience and created a sense that it had impacted the character enough that they remembered everything. Then the nightmare creature was described as having a hideous warped face. After the bespoke focus of the preceding description, having the entire face reduced to two adjectives, and common adjectives for a monster at that, left me feeling cheated.
My hope that the prose would be powerful enough to make the trudge across those paragraph gulfs worthwhile died so I pulled the plug.
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