Monthly Archives: December 2015

George Saunders Explains How to Tell a Good Story – The Atlantic

Posted by mattS

For George Saunders, “crafting a good story means not condescending to your reader. It means creating sentences that clue them into something unnoticed about the character, and allowing them to figure it out.”

Cleaning up my bookshelves the other day I came across George Saunders’ absurd, humorous and terrifying short novel, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil”. It’s been a few years at least since I read it, but every time I notice it on the shelf I want to pick it up and become reacquainted with it.

It was one of those books I came across while working in the stockroom at Barnes & Noble, was intrigued by but promptly forgot the title and author of as I unpacked forty or fifty more boxes. So it was some time later that, needing to de-stress after a shift, I wandered up and down the fiction aisle just glancing at spines looking for clever titles that sounded interesting.

(This is the exact same scenario that led me to “The End of the Alphabet” so I think I can safely say the ‘wandering around picking books entirely because of interesting titles’ method works well for me.)

Anyway, I stumbled back upon George and Phil and this thin, yet eye-catching book. In fact, I am between books right now, I may need to stumble upon it again today….

In the meantime, you should check out George Saunders Explaining How to Tell a Good Story from The Atlantic.

Posted in Books

A Vintage Cover and a Fresh Approach | Reading Chris Holm’s “Dead Harvest”

Dec 3

Posted by mattS

I originally picked out Chris Holm’s “Dead Harvest” because of the cover, finding it while searching out cool vintage book covers. Self-publishing a few short stories through Kindle and Nook means you have to make your own covers, and there’s something eternally cool about the old paperback covers.

So how did picking a book by its cover work out for me? I’d say pretty well.

The last twenty pages of “Dead Harvest” totally makes this book. The first hundred are great too. The ones in-between? Well, they’re decent. They keep you going, I’ll give you that.

Those pages keep Sam and Kate stumbling, running, and trying to figure things out, stealing bodies, stealing cars, stealing—sorry, hijacking—helicopters all while dodging demons, angels and the majority of the New York City police department. While some of it seems unnecessary or excessive (the helicopter), I never hit the point I wanted to put it down, probably due to the back-story of Sam Thornton, the Collector, as we find out a little more, not only his own back-story rooted in the 1940s and why he’s damned to an eternity of collecting souls, but also on the mythology that runs throughout the story of demons, angels, and possession.

It’s Sam’s personal back-story and the relationship between man, demon and angel that all comes together at the end, in those last few pages, and adds a little twist to a story that was starting to feel a little sluggish. Could this book have stood to lose a few pages? Maybe a hundred? Sure.