Linguistic cartwheels in the stylings of a rant, these are the thoughts that keep me up at night.
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I am a 20 year old female writer residing in Central New Jersey. My influences include the great Dave Barry, Neil Gaiman, George Carlin, and the two greatest editors in the world, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. My webpage can be found at www.homestead.com/foxfyresden and I can be reached at Foxfyre33@aol.com. Happy reading!
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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
In response to "A Good Man Is Hard To Find."
I don't consider this story terribly grotesque, merely abrupt. While I would never consider murdering a flesh-and-blood human being (well, okay, I *would* - the people at the DMV would be toast - but I would actually *do* it...) if ever a literary character was asking to be offed, it's the grandmother. I mean, honestly - who brings a damn cat in a valise and spews racial slurs around children?
At the end, I must admit to a bit of confusion. They took the husband and the son and shot them - that much I got. They shot the wife and daughter - that much I got as well. But as he was about to shoot the Grandmother, I didn't understand about her saying that he was "one of her babies, one of her own children". Was it a last-ditch attempt to save her own life? Was she comparing the Misfit to Bailey? Or was she speaking as Jesus might have spoken to his disciples?
This is a dull and undeveloped story, murky as light shining upwards through a weed-choked pool. The only character that actually functioned as a real character was the grandmother, and everyone else, even the Misfit, seemed unformed lumps of literary clay with a few details thrown in for the charity of the reader. It moves too quickly and there is indeed far too much convenience to the mention and subsequent appearance of the Misfit; it's as if the entire ordeal was a badly-written Junior High one-act. It jerks the reader through, slamming them into the brick wall of the executions, and then picking them up and dropping them at the starting point, confused, battered, and bruised.
7:12 AM
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