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Review #4678553
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Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
Rated: | (3.5)
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When in doubt, have someone come through the door with a gun in his hand. You can figure out why he’s there later, but in the moment it gets things moving.
—Raymond Chandler


I like how this starts out. Mostly, I like how you don’t explain a lot. You keep the reader in the same state of confusion as your main character. As he is thinking, “What’s going on, here?” so too is your reader. As Raymond Chandler knew, as long as things keep happening, your reader will keep reading in an effort to answer that question.

Then you strap your main character into the white chair, and everything grinds to a halt. Suddenly, you no longer have a character trying to puzzle out a confusing set of circumstances; now it’s a guy watching a video, with all the story functions, such as they are, outsourced to the video narrative.

Why would you do that? If the presentation is to be believed, further unknown situations await your main character down the road, although after this preview of coming attractions it may seem a bit anti-climatic when when we get there. It seems to me you should just cut to the chase, get him to his destination, keep him confused and set him on the path of trying to figure out where he is and what’s happening to him.

As long as you have all the background information worked out, you don’t need to tell us anything. We’ll hang in there with you as long as it seems you know what you’re doing. If your setting is consistent, and the elements that come our way conform to a logic, albeit one we may not see the contours of, you can get away with a lot. And you won’t need to break the action to spoon feed information to us.

The 60s cult classic “The Prisoner” worked from that same set-up. Unfortunately, I always suspected the writers were winging it from episode to episode. None of the weird stuff that happened made sense, but it all seemed like it might, if we could just find some of the missing puzzle pieces. Alas, they were never provided. The final episode saw the main character dumped back in the real world with no explanation.

You might want to avoid that cop-out.
   *CheckG* You responded to this review 12/01/2022 @ 5:39pm EST
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