?פֿאַר װאָס זאָל איך אײַך געבן דירה-געלט אַז די קיך איז צעבראָכן

[sovay]

The weekend continued sleepless af with a double whammy of financial stress and I got nothing done that I had wanted, but spatch took a picture of me when I got back in from my walk that I liked, which these days is vanishing. I am not confident a normal amount of summer actually happened.

Comments

[sovay]

Did you read it? I just finished it, and it has such a sudden and extreme tonal shift at the end that I'm not sure that I would have recommended it if I'd read the whole thing as of Sept. 1.

I actually had not gotten around to it and would not require an apology even if I had hated it, but that's some takeback. May I ask what happened?

[gullyfoyle]

The story uses multiple devices to explore perception: metatexts, dreams, unreliable narrators, stories within stories, fairy tale-ism vs detailed reality -- things like that. So maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised with the story gradually shifted from apparent ghost story to possible romance and then very abruptly to something that could have come out of "The Silence of the Lambs" or "Psycho." So of course one comes away wondering what *really* happened. Is this a supernatural ghost story, or are the main characters delusional and possibly psychotic? (Shades (tee hee) of "The Turn of the Screw," of course.) That kind of story certainly can certainly appeal, but a lot of that appeal is often in the slow build, the detailed but often reluctant explorations of the characters into what may actually be happening. But here the story (or stories) shift and mutate, and finally that happens so suddenly and extremely and so close to the end of the story that the effect was jarring. There is a lot going on with the storytelling here, and I'm not sure the author completely succeeded in fitting the story into the storytelling. Again, it's well worth reading, but it's only the first section of it that reminds of "As the Tide Came Flowing In." The rest is something different, which I suspect you'll like. Someone liked it, since it won the WFA and was selected for multiple Year's Best anthologies. I'm not sure I would have put it in my own Year's Best (had I one), but definitely an honorable mention.