Akashic Books, 2009

Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery

The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city.

Authors in this collection range from immediately recognizable names like Stewart O’Nan and Dan Lee to writers like J. Itabari, who is making her fiction debut in the book. Lehane also included himself in the collection. An editor selecting him or herself for their own collection is usually frowned upon, but as a reader and writer of crime fiction Lehane realizes his omission from a collection of Boston noir would be a glaring one, and his story is a standout.

As any resident of Boston knows, the boundaries of our city are flexible, and extend far beyond downtown. Lehane places stories from the areas more Boston than the common: Southie, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain. But Lehane also traces the social geography our city’s inhabitants know well: the tribal locals, the mystified transplants, the wise-guys longing for the simple and brutal yesterday being erased by gentrification. He shows us the rough past of the north end in “Femme Sole”, a story set in 1745. The anger and confusion and guilt and shame revolving around the priest sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese is explored in all its complexity in John Dufresne’s “The Cross-Eyed Bear.” The commuter mentality is captured perfectly in Lynne Heitman’s story of a woman struggling to break through the glass ceiling in the financial district during the week and who spends her weekends far, far away.

The only fault I find with this collection is that despite the breadth of locations and characters, there seems to be an obvious omission. Lehane writes of the feeling of loss experienced in a “less violent and beiger city”, one being calmed and tamed by progress. Yet we are not presented stories seen from the side of the other. In a city with more students than pigeons, we never enter a campus—high school or college. The collection is free of entitled yuppies, another Boston mainstay. The “beigers” themselves, the affluent upwardly-mobile, the mid-thirties restaurateurs pushing into the south end, the hipsters painting murals over the graffiti in Somerville and Jamaica Plain, and the tourists being guided through the park by a man dressed as Ben Franklin are absent. The part of the city the locals roll their eyes at, but cannot disavow, is not represented. We don’t necessarily need a story to take place on a Mega Super Duck Tour, but it wouldn’t be Boston without hearing their ubiquitous quack.

In his intro to this collection Lehane sets himself an ambitious goal. “One of the recurrent themes of Noir has always been the search for a home,” Lehane writes. “Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it -however fruitless that goal might turn out to be- is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.” The worst of these stories are great noir tales in their own right that evoke the city in a paint-by-numbers fashion (throw in a Red Sox hat here, a view of the Prudential Center there, and, of course, a healthy amount of “wicked,” and your story is set in Boston). In the best, the city itself is acting upon the musician from New York now living in the Back Bay, or the single mother relocated to the suburbs, and becomes the unseen protagonist in the story.

The idea of setting as a major character in this collection interests me because so much of the idea of Noir is tied up in setting, from Chandler’s Los Angeles to the mean streets of New York. The Noir series has already mined some of the most obvious choices like The Bronx, Chicago, D.C., Havana, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, among others. Now, though, the series is dipping into territory that does not readily lend itself to noir fiction: Richmond, Pheonix, “Indian County,” Trinidad. Trinidad noir? I’m intrigued. Lehane suggests that noir is more than skuzzy people acting skuzzily, and as the series moves away from the more familiar locations I think we will see the definition of noir stretched in new ways. Delaware Noir? Maine Noir? Saskatchewan Noir? I don’t know what it those collections would look like, but I can’t wait to find out.

Read these books: Nobody Move (Johnson), Inherent Vice (Pynchon), Shutter Island (Lehane), Moose Noir (Palin)

What do these three have in common? They all have absolutely no business writing or "writing" books.

News about books and ebooks from around the web:

• Vapidity will continue to rule the bestseller list. Sarah Palin plans to “write” another book (get ready, Marcos), Lindsay Lohan has plans to hawk her crazed mutterings, and Hilary Duff just signed a contract to write a series of young-adult Da Vinci Code-style caper novels (I kid you not). Previously, we learned about reality star Lauren Conrad, who’s writing novels (plural) despite having never read a whole book in her life (which you should do, if you want to write one). Then there’s always Dan Brown, a terrible writer of stupid books (even his website wants to be a movie)… but he has 80,000,000 readers. And let’s never forget Douglas Preston, a horrible writer who’s so overprivileged and out of touch that he attacked his own readers for not paying exorbitant prices for his crappy books. Please help me solve this. If you like any of those writers, do me a personal favor: stop buying their books and watch TV instead. TV does mindless entertainment much better than books, and then books can go back to being carefully crafted works of the imagination, and not just paycheck tickets cranked out by illiterate uncaring morons and vapid celebrities trying to cash in on their fleeting fame. Publishing industry: I hate you. To wrap up this rant, here is a grossly unreadable article about nothing, written by an editor from Knopf. It’s a joke, right? Nobody’s that bad a writer, especially not a professional editor, right? Right?

• Borders is broke and starting heavy layoffs. Three months ago, while discussing the Nook, I noticed that Borders notably had no plans to release its own ereader/ebookstore. I said this about it: “Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.” Based on my understanding of the financial gobbledygook in the article in that first link, that timeline was just  slightly generous. Ebooks are the way of the future, bookstores. Don’t be shy.

• Two weeks ago, the NY Times published this article by Motoko Rich about the prices of ebooks vs. paper books. It included this chart, which got everybody in a huff because it claimed that ebooks selling for as low as $9.99 will provide as much profit to publishers (not authors) as full-price, $26 hardcover books. Among the respondents: Gizmodo, GalleyCat, John August, and almost everybody else in the world. I just have one thing to add. Rich estimates the costs of printing and shipping at $3.25. Since online hardcover prices max out at about $15, that means, logically, ebook prices should max out at about $12. Since some new, hardcover, guaranteed bestsellers go for even less (like Stieg Larsson’s next one, pre-selling at Amazon for $11.50), ebook editions of those should come in at sub-$10. Which means maybe readers asking for $9.99 ebooks wasn’t so astonishingly entitled after all. Maybe the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle lost Macmillan more than it gained them. Maybe publishers should shut up about prices and windowing and all those other caveats, and just put their weight behind ebooks. Stop treating your customers like enemies, and maybe everything will turn out OK.

• The Millions has a list of newly released books. I’m most excited about Ron Rash’s story collection. His last novel was excellent.

• Quick takes: Yann Martel has been sending aliterate Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks for three years; Charles Pellegrino is the newest James Frey (side note: this guy is the James Frey of photographers); TeleRead’s Paul Biba says he’s sold on the Alex reader; the Tournament of Books is live (via)—bookmark it; we’re smack in the middle of Read an eBook Week; the NY Times is making an ereader edition of their Book Review section—makes sense, right?

• Random of the week: Contrariwise is a great site featuring pictures of people’s literary-themed tattoos. Below is my favorite from their Alice in Wonderland series, coincidentally from the passage that gave Contrariwise its name.

When I read last January that J.D. Salinger had died, that’s where my mind went first, not to Cornish, New Hampshire and his forty five years of literary silence, not to the vault of unpublished works we’re all crossing our fingers for, but to a stuffy room I last saw twelve years ago.  It was a hot day near the end of the school year.  The chair was upholstered in a heavy fabric that made me sweat.  There was no clock on the wall, and I hardly moved for hours.

I didn’t know anything about the book before I started reading except that it was important.  I can’t remember now what I expected, but I’m sure it wasn’t Holden Caulfield.  I was stunned by his voice.  I’d never read anything so conversational and direct.  I felt like he was right there in the room, skipping class, too, so he could tell me about all “this madman stuff” from last Christmas.  The two of us could’ve been the only people left in the world for all I knew or cared.

Over the next few years I read all the Salinger I could find.  I was disappointed there was so little, and, to be honest, the rest of his canon mostly confused me.  I wasn’t ready for the subtlety of Nine Stories or the mysticism of everything else.  Nothing else gripped me the way Catcher had; nothing else left me with the same impression of where I was when I read it and what that place smelled like.

I looked up when the bell rang, surprised to find myself alone with the musty smell of old anthologies and cheap wood paneling.  My classmates went streaming by the door without looking in.  I watched them pass, and I thought about Holden alone in New York City, the freedom of no one knowing where you are.  I waited until the hallway was empty, and then I waited a little longer.  The hall was so quiet when I finally left that I could hear the echo of my locker latching as I walked out.

I’ve since reread all of Salinger, and though my favorites have changed (for the moment, Just Before the War with the Eskimos and For Esmé—with Love and Squalor) nothing has had a greater effect on me than Catcher in the Rye.  As an aspiring writer, it taught me all kinds of things about voice and the relationship between the narrator and the reader, but it was as a reader that I felt something crystallize, something I never knew I’d understood all along as a lover of books, and something which, as an increasingly self-conscious teen, I was beginning to lose sight of: the pleasure of disappearing for a while.

For the record,  my favorite, favorite book ever and a book I truly think any reader should drop everything for is Lolita. But I’ve harped on it on this site again and again already. I read a lot of books, though, and there are a ton I think every reader should read. Steven Millhauser has written a number of these and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories is my favorite of his. Read it now.

Millhauser was one of a handful of excellent professors I had in college, so I’m a little biased. If you’re reading this site, I’d be a little surprised you’ve never heard of him. But if somehow you haven’t read him, you should. He is undeniably one of the most precise and imaginative writers writing today. He is a fabulist and a natural storyteller with a knack for writing stories that are at once cerebral and accessible.

The stories in this book cover a range of themes and styles. The opening number is written in the first person plural–keeping a story with a faceless “we” narrator contained is no easy task–and Millhauser handles this mode with as much confidence and finesse as Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides. He uses this perspective in a few other stories in this collection as well. In fact, one of my favorite stories, “Beneath the Cellars of Our Town,” is told from the collective voice of a town that decides to relocate itself to a series of underground passageways and become mole people.

That’s one of the zanier premises in the book. The zaniest story of all, “A Visit,” also happens to be my favorite. How out there is it? Well, it’s about a guy who drives to New England to stay the weekend with his old college roommate and his friend’s new wife, who happens to be a two-foot-tall bullfrog.

These stories are so great not because they are wild and out there, but because of the tremendous restraint Millhauser shows while working within the fantastic. He writes in a serious tone always: his narrators don’t spin yarns, they put their lives to paper. Millhauser makes sure the perfect details are captured in every story (but this doesn’t mean every detail: look for the screwdriver with the yellow handle in “A Visit” and you’ll understand what I mean).

Not every story is as on the fringe as these. Millhauser’s most identifiable stories feature realities that subtly diverge from our own. A dedicated master, such as Heinrich in “The New Automation Theater,” creates the impossible, or a group of characters, like the audience in the eponymous story, experience–and accept–something beyond the normal boundary of reality.

Any reader who enjoys short stories and literary fiction has probably come across Millhauser at some point. If you haven’t, get on that now, starting with The Knife Thrower. His other books are great too (all of them), so any is a great place to start reading this American master. Read this book now.

Read these too: Anything else by Millhauser, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Shepard), Leaf Storm (García Márquez), Book of Wonder (Dunsany)

Author: Steve Almond

2010 (self-published)

Filed Under Literary, Short Stories, Nonfiction

(Note: to the best of my knowledge this book is only available through on-demand publishing via an Espresso Book Machine. There is one at the Harvard Bookstore)

This is a tiny little book, split into two parts of about 40 small pages each. It really won’t take but a minute to read, well, maybe an hour. One side is titled “Essays” and the other “Stories” and they are flipped 180 degrees, so neither (or both I guess) comes first. There are three separate covers to choose from, and Almond has already revised it once since the initial printing. I think I’m a fan of this new fangled on demand printing thing.

Seeing as I really only know of Almond as a fiction writer (I very much enjoyed his 2005 collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories), I opted to open with the “Stories” half first.  These are all short shorts, none longer than 4-5 paragraphs. There’s no plot thread connecting these and not much of a thematic line. Short shorts aren’t really a form I’m all that into. I read it like I do poetry, mostly for language and not so much for substance. I enjoyed these, but it’s not really the type of thing I tend to go back to. Almond is a talented writer, and the language is quite good:

This is where the cranes come to sleep, the ripped out yard-by-gravel mile between the bus terminal and the freeway still unconstructed, its fading gray ramps into nothing. They bundle here under night, clanking, steel thread and iron, the hard things of this world. Neglected by their soft owners, the cranes huddles and murmur old jokes, somber, worn, from the duties of lifting and sniffing on each other the perfume of oil going black. They know not to nod their giant necks, not to run their hooks against loose rebar. This is the hour of rest, when nothing is built or remembered. The wind through their loose parts is idle syncopation and notes whistle up, a song made with every measure of grace, as where honest labor has been done and fellowship means beast and machine. Sleep, good citizens, it is not yours to hear this sweet offering.

The “Essays” side of the book is the one I’d assumed I’d like less. Almond, however, surprised me with one of the best guides to writing I’ve come across to date.

Unlike the stories, Almond’s essays follow a sequence of questions and answers, almost as if he’s inserting his own responses into a writerly catechism.  It’s really written for students (enrolled in a program or otherwise) of writing. But anyone who entertains writing fiction or is interested at all in the writing process should defintiely give this a read. And, speaking from many dreadful workshop experiences: writing teachers should read this, as well as a few of the books I’ve suggested below.

Almond’s now-recognizable voice comes through especially clear in these essays. He reminds me a lot of George Saunders: biting and sarcastic and a little insane, yet undeniably wise. He writes in a funny yet serious tone that screams authority but doesn’t demand it. Writers should read this book, and everybody should read Steve Almond.

Similar Reads: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut), On Writing (King), Eats, Shoots, & Leaves (Truss), The Evil B.B. Chow (Almond), The Braindead Megaphone (Saunders)

Author: Heather Gudenkauf

Mira, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Mystery

The Weight of Silence follows a relatively simple mystery, at the center of which is seven-year-old Calli Clark, who hasn’t spoken in three years. When Calli’s father drunkenly grabs her and drags her into the woods early one morning, the entire town sets about trying to figure out what happened to her (and her friend, Petra, who also wandered off that morning).

Most of the book deals with the people in Calli’s and Petra’s lives, and the relationships between them, as they appear in the light of crisis. When Gudenkauf tries to formulate a plot, though, it works for a little while, but eventually fizzles out in a two-fold ending full of underwhelming misdirection.

Silence features some phenomenal suspense and some engaging characters, but the actual mystery is lackluster. Most of the time it’s a real nail-biter of a book, even if all you wind up with is ragged nails.

Gudenkauf tells this story from half a dozen different perspectives: Calli; her brother; her mother, Toni; Petra; Petra’s father; and a deputy sheriff named Louis who has a history with Calli’s mom. For the novel’s first half, this structure works well. We get interweaving, nuanced relationships: Louis and Toni’s jilted young love, Petra and Calli’s uniquely close friendship, and Petra’s father’s personal history tinged with sadness and redemption.

Halfway through, when this routine is starting to wear thin, the plot twists, and it seems like the second half will use those tense relationships to craft a thriller. To a certain extent, that plan succeeds. There’s struggle, suspicion, violence, a possible murderer on the loose, and (for me, at least) an all-consuming hatred for one particular character. Unfortunately, that last part is where the novel begins to break down.

The character I hated is Griff Clark, Calli’s father. He’s a two-dimensional monster. Not only is Griff alcoholic and abusive, he is entirely oblivious to his actions. He will, for instance, beat up his son, and then blame his son for getting beat up. Sometimes he screams at his family in public. His son hates him, and can’t wait for him to leave and go back to his job in Alaska. And his wife, Calli’s mom, has stayed with him for more than twelve years, while he’s been alcoholic and abusive the entire time. In the meantime, the love of her life, the deputy sheriff Louis, is a kind and good man, unhappily married, who wants to be there for her, and with her.

Maybe that’s the way it really happens with battered women, I’m certainly no expert. But in a novel, that has to be handled in a different way. Either Griff has to have some kind of charm or charisma (Calli’s mom tells us he does, but he never actually displays even a hint), or another character has to explicitly tell us that a battered woman really will stay with an abusive monster despite his complete lack of humanity or conscience or remorse.

Without either of those qualifiers, the narrative effect of Griff’s monsterism was that I never cared who the real evildoer was. For most of the book, I just wanted Griff to be severely punished. Which I guess Gudenkauf anticipated, because the real evildoer is never the point. That mystery gets solved, eventually, with a shrug, and it’s the worst part of the book.

While rooting against Griff is compelling and suspenseful, it’s not a mystery. And ultimately it seems like Gudenkauf can’t quite decide whether to be a mystery writer or a literary characterist. So, the two sides don’t quite meet in the middle, and the relationships she builds so painstakingly never quite mean anything to the hamfisted plot.

However: Griff aside, I was riveted, up until the last ten pages. Gudenkauf’s characters are mostly believable and her prose is strong and transparent—in other words, it serves the story and rarely shows off or gets in the way, which is harder than it looks. The big problem, bigger than Griff, is that ending. It’s as if Gudenkauf couldn’t find a satisfying way to tie together all the disparate puzzle pieces she spends so long sawing out.

So she doesn’t. Nothing, in the end, really has to do with anything else, and the several plotlines never congeal. During the ending, too, all the perspectives become a bit too much for Gudenkauf to handle. They start creating pacing problems, especially when the plot splits in two and Gudenkauf keeps cutting away from the active, tense storyline to fill us in on the boring, non-time-critical one.

Gudenkauf’s characters, prose, and knack for suspense point to a talent that bears watching. But until she figures out how to hang all that on a good plot, her mysteries won’t be satisfying. Silence is a one-night-stand of a book: it’ll keep you up late and it’s pretty fun while it lasts, but the next morning you won’t have much to show for it.

Similar books: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold; Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

Edgar impact: Like The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, this novel has its share of good features, but a lackluster ending leaves a sour taste. Still, the suspense Silence creates is enough to make it a contender in Best First Novel By An American Author.

I was waiting for a professor of mine who was meeting me for lunch.  He was running a few minutes late, but I hardly noticed or cared.  I had The Emigrants open in front of me.  I’d just started it on the bus that morning, so I didn’t quite know what I was in for yet.  The slow unfolding of the first chapter, the long paragraphs, liquid with shifting voices, and the curatorial attention to detail all gave me the feeling of floating through a small British village submerged in saltwater and preserved in light.  I didn’t realize my professor had arrived until, standing right next to me, he said, that’s a great book.

Instead of the things we’d planned to talk about (a different book and just what the hell was I supposed to do after an M.F.A.?), we talked about The Emigrants.  When it first came out, his wife had taken a copy with her on a flight to France.  After she landed, she called to say that he had to read this book.  He said he’d be happy to read it when she was finished with it, and she said, no, go buy another copy right now and read it.  It’s that good.

My professor told me a little bit about Sebald, too, how he’d been short listed for the Nobel prize and how he’d died in a car accident at 57, how his work aped memoir and subverted conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction.  The book is undoubtedly based in Sebald’s own life—he, like the narrator, emigrated from Germany to teach at a university in England—but there are signs of invention everywhere.  He asked me if I’d noticed the butterfly man yet.  I said no, and he warned me to keep an eye out for the butterfly man as I kept reading.

A few days later, when I finished the book, I returned my library copy and went out immediately to buy my own.  I’ve since reread it twice in the past two years.

The Emigrants presents four portraits of people who left their homelands for other parts of Europe, Asia, or the U.S.  It reads at times like a diary, at times like an interview, like a travelogue, like a mystery, always with a sense of urgency, as if the writing could somehow save its subjects from their personal histories.  The voice melds the narrator with the novel’s other characters in a unified investigation of alienation and loss in the brutality and turmoil of the twentieth century.

I know this doesn’t sound like your typical page-turner, but I’m willing to bet that once you finish the portrait of Dr. Henry Selwyn you might feel differently.  The pace is as hypnotic as waves, and the dream is so complete that looking up from the page feels like staring up at a clear blue sky through a few feet of sun-drenched seawater.

Similar books: Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald; The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink; Reading in the Dark, by Seamus Deane.

.

Bloodline

Dracula sequel?

better than I would have guessed

this was not Twilight

.

The Unit

isn’t too unique

good read if you’re up for it

at least it is fun

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Plain Pursuit

vapid and trite trash

paper dolls could emote more

books should welcome thought

.

Going Rogue

Marcos gets ranty

but he kept his points valid

ha! moose excrement

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Fun With Problems

Stone’s best writing is

all about the dalliance

too bad he needs plot

.

The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death

Nico: not impressed

ending fizzles out badly

won’t get an Edgar

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Worlds at War

top-notch history

comprehensive as all heck

Pagden spins a yarn

.

Read This Book Now Series

Malcom X and Reap

led off our months-long series

oh, what will come next?

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and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/23/exactly-how-bad-a-writer-is-douglas-preston/ http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/23/exactly-how-bad-a-writer-is-douglas-preston/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:17:39 +0000 Nico Vreeland http://chamberfour.com/?p=6434 Douglas Preston is a jerk and an author who gets his jollies by viciously insulting his readers, and then continuing to insult them.

I’ve ranted twice about Preston in the past two weeks, and I’ve called him a hack more than once. I wanted to see just how good or bad a writer he is, so I borrowed one of his ebooks (Riptide) from the library. Turns out he’s pretty bad, and I’m going to show you exactly why. This probably won’t be the last time I make fun of Preston, but considering he still hasn’t apologized for insulting his readers (and pretty much all readers of ebooks), he’s got some insults coming his own way.

The point of this isn’t (just) to mock Preston because he’s a hypocritical, self-righteous blowhard who’s trying to exploit his readers instead of appreciating them. It’s also to put the lie to Preston’s comments about how readers don’t want to pay “the real price” for his books. Going by these passages, his readers are, in fact, significantly overpaying.

(This book, and most of Preston’s, are co-written by Lincoln Child, who didn’t insult his own readers. But he did sign off on this insultingly condescending open letter, so he’s guilty of at least aiding and abetting.)

Let’s have some fun.

The novel opens with a bang. Here’s the first line of Chapter 1:

Malin Hatch was bored with summer.

I’m bored with this book. Already.

Here’s the opening of Chapter 2, starring a small, contemplative laboratory (and costarring a whole bunch of bland adjectives):

The small laboratory looked out from the Mount Auburn Hospital annex across the leafy tops of the maple trees to the slow, sullen waters of the Charles River. A rower in a needle-like shell was cutting through the dark water with powerful strokes, peeling back a glittering wake.

Here’s a throwaway line that reads like Bulwer-Lytton wrote a Laffy Taffy wrapper:

“You must have been as disappointed as the surgeon who hopes for a tumor and finds gallstones.”

OK, let’s play a game. One of these characters is a sea captain. The other is a research scientist. Guess which is which!

Character 1’s dialogue:

“If we’re to be partners—an ever-receding possibility—we’ll have to trust each other.”

“Invisible ink? You’ve been reading too many Hardy Boys stories.”

“Don’t tell me you believe such a mossy old legend.”

Character 2’s dialogue:

“Ever been to Houndsbury? It’s a charming little town, very Cotswolds, but all in all rather unremarkable I suppose, if it weren’t for its exquisite cathedral.”

“I’ve restricted myself to maps and surveys.”

“Why does it remain fogbound?”

If you said Character 1 was the research scientist, you’re right! If you said it doesn’t matter because the authors put as little effort into dialogue as possible, you get a bonus point!

Next up, here’s the winner of the “Attempt At Nostalgia That Goes Off The Rails” Award, from a scene in which the good doctor goes back to his hometown convenience store:

Hatch inhaled the grocer’s scent—a mixture of ham, fish, and cheese—and felt both relieved and embarrassed, as if he were suddenly a boy again.

And the winner of the “Wait, That’s Supposed To Be Funny?” Award:

“One other thing, Malin.”

Hatch froze. He knew he’d gotten off too easily. He waited, dreading the question he knew was coming.

“You watch out with that licorice,” Bud said with great solemnity. “Those teeth won’t last forever, you know.”

Here’s an example from the “Why Write Good Dialogue When The Narrator Can Just Explain It?” file:

“And how’s your mother?” Bud asked.

“She passed away in 1985. Cancer.”

“Sorry to hear that.” Hatch could tell Bud meant it.

And one from the “Why Have The Narrator Explain It When We Can Put It In Awkward, Expository Dialogue?” file:

“The dinghy’s at the dock,” Hatch said. “But we’re not going to land. There’s no natural harbor. Most of the island is ringed with high bluffs, so we wouldn’t be able to see much from the rocks anyway. And the bulk of the island is too dangerous to walk on.”

And the “Just In Case You Were Too Stupid To Get It The First Time” file (this is twelve pages after the above passage):

“There’s no natural harbor,” Hatch replied. “The place is surrounded by reefs, and there’s a wicked tiderip.”

And the “Makes Sense Until You Think About It For A Second” Award winner:

But the intention fell away unpursued.

The “Yup, That’s What Color Wood Is” Award winner:

As he approached, he could see it was an antique fireboat, built of rich brown wood

The “This Dude Has Boring, Meaningless Thoughts” Award:

Probably a Thalassa boat, he thought, swinging up from Portland.

The “That’s One Pretentious Freaking Sea Captain” Award:

“There are some who say there is no treasure at the bottom of the Water Pit. To those doubters, I say: Gaze upon this.“

The “And The Ground Over There Is Lava, Tee Hee Hee” Award:

Ahead stretched an unbroken mass of sawgrass and fragrant tea roses, swaying in the breeze, concealing the deadly ground below. … It’s suicide to run across there, he thought even as his legs began to move and he was crashing through the brush

OK, that’s about enough of this nonsense. Clearly Preston has a tenuous at best grasp on the English language. And this is all from the first 20% of one novel. He’s got another dozen novels out there in the world.

I’ll get to those soon.