Today we see that if you tell readers too loudly that your book is great, they’ll assume you don’t trust your stories to stand on their own.
What I gleaned about the stories: If re-enacting the path of famously tricky mystery, be sure you look where you’re stepping.
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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 front matter contains several pages of quotes about this book from various sources and others by the author. It started strongly, but I was overcome with tedium by the middle of the second page. I also wondered why the author felt the need to tell readers at such length that the book was good: was this a collection where the characters and plots wouldn’t prove their own worth?
Realising that I had completely forgotten the book in favour of trying to recall whether “methinks he doth protest to much” was from Macbeth or not, I moved on.
Analysis: A short distance into the collection, I hit fearful. My immediate thought was that the formatting had gone wrong and not been caught in a proof-read. An instant later, I began to wonder whether it was intended; however, no good reason for the emphasis occurred.
This delay weakened immersion enough that I noticed that either way was ugly, and thus moved on.
Analysis: The stories display a good balance of similarity and variation that avoided a jarring transition from one flavour to a radically different one.
Analysis: Each character, narrators especially, felt distinct, further avoiding the sense of sameness that can come from reading an author’s works back-to-back.
Analysis: A few stories later, a line suddenly ended in the middle of a sentence. The sentence continued at the start of the next paragraph, but by then my mind had assumed that both a section of the text had been omitted and that—as is usual—a new mental image had begun.
The depth of immersion I’d built gone in an instant, 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.
