Seedye

Too much lens flare

Revisado: 02-24-22

Lee Mandelo has a good ear for what prose should sound like. It flows smoothly under the pleasant narration by Will Damron. But he needs an editor. Mandelo’s prose is excessively bulked with lots of flash words that distract from the story, like excessive CGI lens flare added to movies to punch up their scenes. Lens flare can be pretty, but too much and it underscores the artifice of the movie rather than letting you be swept away by the story.

Once you notice the excesses, you can’t help noticing how inapt Mandelo’s word choices often are, too. A character “crouched where he stood”. One character touches another with “dry, sticky hands”. A professor is “earnest as a greyhound,” which avoids cliché, but is confusing, like “sly as an oak tree”. Did the author mean “eager”? Also, this is the only place where the narration is folksy. The characters are appropriately folksy for their region and class, but with this one exception, the narration is not folksy. Were these the only flubs, it’d pass without notice, but they appear in every other paragraph.

The emotional tone is always set to 11. A character opening a fridge door is described with as much emotional weight as the paranormal events and car races, making the what should be peaks and valleys into a long, tedious plain.

The story is clearly written from an outline, which is a good practice in theory, but you shouldn’t be able to see the contours of the outline as a reader. The characters in this story seem like they’re being dragged by the scruff of their necks from one plot point to the next, rather than the plot being the outcome of characters acting on their motives. Characters argue like dogs that were goaded into a fight by their master, the author, because the outline demands it. I was often thinking “Why are they fighting?” or as arguments dragged on and become repetitive, “Why are they STILL fighting??”

At one point, protagonist Andrew is visited by his estranged girlfriend, who breaks up with him five times in one sitting. She gives a reason, and Andrew doesn’t say much, nor does he argue. She then gives a great reason that works as a great exit line. Andrew doesn’t object. She then keeps on, giving more and more reasons to break up that Andrew didn’t ask for, offering unsolicited psychoanalysis. A good editor would excise most of this. A more capable writer would make this interesting. But the outline demanded this scene be Big and Poignant, which the author conflates with More and More Words.

Generally, all the pretty words paper over a lot of incoherent character motivations. Andrew moves to a new town to investigate the death of his friend, Eddy. But as soon as he arrives, he spends the next 20 chapters avoiding investigation. He goes so far as to enroll in Eddy’s degree program — which Andrew has NO interest in, but then avoids class, avoids his advisor, avoids his mentoring TA, and doesn’t do any of the classwork. Why the hell is Andrew enrolled in college? Or even in town? It’s that tyrant, the outline, making him do it.

Andrew wants to learn how Eddy’s roommate, Riley — who is now Andrew’s roommate — factored in to Eddy’s death, but he spends several chapters avoiding Riley. Reasonably, Andrew is reluctant to open up to a stranger about the upsetting paranormal events he shared with Eddy. But, as it turns out, Riley was in on Eddy’s Scooby Gang, and had some paranormal insight into Andrew’s situation as well, and yet Riley sits by and watches Andrew flail about for a dozen chapters without saying anything. And then suddenly Riley reveals what he knows. Why? The outline doesn’t call for Riley’s reveal until later.

Andrew goes into Eddy’s room looking for clues multiple times. But as soon as he finds them — a journal, a computer — he just sets them aside. This pattern repeats, to extremes. Andrew goes looking for a clue, and just as it comes within reach, he retreats. A more competent writer would have Andrew’s conflicting emotions transparent to the reader, making us want what Andrew wants and be sad for Andrew when his emotions get in the way. Instead, Andrew is bafflingly chasing clues that he bafflingly doesn’t want to discover. Why, why, WHY? Outline.

Finally, I’ll avoid spoilers, but the romance subplot was not believable. A competent writer in the romance genre, even if their prose is hackneyed and not as polished as Mandelo’s, can navigate this sort of plot easily. Perhaps Mandelo was trying too hard to escape genre conventions? Whatever the cause, I couldn’t give a crap about the relationship. For that matter, all of the character interactions were pretty incoherent, and Andrew himself is a dull cipher, so it was hard to be invested in any of the characters.

If you’re looking to become a better writer, this book is a good example of what not to do.

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Flowery prose obscures a unique world, characters

Revisado: 04-30-21

I’m a fan of writers like Jeanette Winterson and Lorrie Moore, whose prose is highly stylized. I don’t think every writer needs to be a Hemingway. But Wilson’s writing is so bloated with exotic adjectives, it quickly becomes a chore to listen to. Metaphors are often inapt, and confusing, better reframed as similes.

It’s an interesting world populated with interesting characters that get lost in a soup of adjectives. Towards the end, I was finding it hard to pay attention to the plot.

Did the sorcerer kill the big cat, or did the captain? Or were there two and one of them killed the captain? Were the sorcerer and captain lovers before they set out with the caravan or after? Don’t know, don’t care to slog through the morass to find out.

I think Wilson has a great talent, but needs a better editor and maybe a writing coach.

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Needs an editor

Revisado: 09-25-20

While the dialog seems natural, there’s too much pointless banter that causes scenes to drag, rather than setting a light tone.

Too many characters are the witty sarcastic one, just like the protagonist.

The best scenes are when the author takes a serious tone, or with action. But the instinct to have every character be jokey, jokey, jokey all the time often spoils the mood, rather than lightening it: The jokes fail to land, and it makes the scene less real. Even if the protagonist has impulse control issues, the other characters don’t have that excuse. And in the real world, a person who’s funny at inappropriate times suffers consequences for it, at least some of the time.

Speaking of impulse control issues, the protagonist’s attempts to get super powers are so stupid as to stretch credulity, and can’t be passed off as adorable quirky ADHD mania.

Trying to microwave a cricket to make it radioactive? Buying “magic” costume jewelry on eBay? He isn’t a 5-year-old, why isn’t he institutionalized? So cringeworthy.

Also, the author has control over this world. The characters know that Spider-Man and Dr Strange are fictional and Extraordinaries are real. Why not have the protagonist’s errant quests revolve around researching the real superhero origins instead of the fictional ones?

Also, what kind of friends would enable such incredibly stupid and fruitless efforts? None of the friends have the ADHD excuse, and are portrayed as smart and grounded. If they’re enabling this stupidity, they really need to be portrayed as psychopaths who aren’t really friends, but just along for the laughs.

It’s the author’s overriding goal of making everything jokey that gets in the way of otherwise talented storytelling. The protagonist’s fan fiction is often better than the rest of the story because the protagonist is writing with sincerity.

Finally, the narrator really is fantastic. The dialog, despite being flabby and overly jokey, is delivered with such perfect pitch. He really carries the novel.

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