(Link)
Now, Will, let me tell you when I read your description, I knew this was a fit:
"One of the hottest e-short stories of the year is Extinction Event. A first person account of the end of life on Earth as we know it."
Yes, even the author agrees it is great. No, no, I get it, it's 2012, very clever. I'm not so sure what the picture is supposed to be there... the main character has nothing to do with the military, even defies governmental authority in the story, but there are no military men. Anyway...
I actually liked some of this guy's descriptions; it seems like he's a student of art or something. But just when he's about to do something great he does something haphazard that makes me feel like I'm reading unedited drunken rantings. For example: "I paused for a moment to ponder: what happened to all the existentialists, the religious, the nihilists? They had all disappeared once it was clear the world was endiwlefj FUCK YOIU I"M NNOT DRUNK" Okay, that's not really in there. Here's an actual example:
"The yard in front of the duplex is surreal--like a work by Dali or someone. A Buick--front end crumpled around the trunk of a palm tree--near the verge of my yard. Two SUVs lay like beaten dogs at the junction between the street and the sidewalk. The body of a young Oriental woman has rolled from one of them and lies like exotic flotsam in the green grass of my lawn. If I look closely perhaps I will see the gray color of her brain through the jagged fracture that mars her otherwise flawless face. I do not look."
At first glance this paragraph seems kinda artful, other than the weird emdashes. But then you're like "the verge of my yard?" That's odd. "I sat on the precipice of my chair reading this." And who makes a simile of beaten dogs like that... does this guy beat dogs enough for them to be a clearer image in his head than a car on its side (which we've all seen)? And do people still use the word Oriental? Isn't that supposed to be offensive? And mars is just a strange word altogether. Isn't grass almost always green? And this is only magnified by a bitchload of typos sprayed throughout so I have to wonder what's really going on here. This was my example of a good paragraph of his. The bad ones go something more like, "In she rushes, and without a 'hello' a 'bye your leave' or anything more than..." The fuck? And I promise you I gave you more context and preparation for that sentence than the story did.
So when I get to the part where culturally his Latino woman literally leaves him a note like, "It is your responsibility as a man to figure out how to save my life so you have to do it," and you're like "Is this unreliable narration using absurdity to-?" No. Because he does save the entire world, single-handedly, because of his Latin machismo, by getting on the internet and telling NASA all they need to do is launch every nuclear warhead on earth at the moon to knock it out of the sky (no, don't even go google that, it's NOT fucking possible). If you think I'm joking you clearly haven't read any of the stories I've reviewed so far.
Ratings:
Drunk: "On a scale of one to ten, I'm soooooo wasted." Or watching TV or trying to escape a burning building or something. I'm not going to be a grammar nazi, because I'm convinced anyone with eyes could fix these grammar mistakes.
Badassitude: 10 out of 5. Yeah it was really edgy when you used all those ellipses, and mentioned the cat eating a child's eye and a woman clawing her face open and a crushed stroller and took the extra letter off your name and, shit, man, I don't know where the hell you get all these badass ideas.
Conflict Resolution: 0 out of 5. Come on, man, anything would have done better than "but I have to prove I'm a man...fuck it, MAGIC, the end."
Overall: Uh...2.5 out of 5. It wasn't so bad until the second half. But the second half was complete shit. Wish I had something more entertaining to say to that. Uh.... uh.... poop! HA!
Haha seriously poop. Get it? amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall
No comments:
Post a Comment