He’s a washed up paddle wheeler captain who has no goal but to captain a paddle wheeler and to beat the fastest paddle wheeler, the Eclipse, in a race. In FD Li’l Abner meets Bayou, hence the cutesy name Cap’n Abner Marsh. They reinforce our norms both of life, and of easily consumable novels. Such books are easily consumable in a ‘don’t have to think’ way.
Full names are used over and over as though we forget from one page to the next. Viewpoints and chapters shift aimlessly without a core driven reason. They have pet swears or phrases or songs, in this book the pet phrase is goddamn. They snicker, they have sleepless nights or they wake up screaming, and they sense people in rooms. Characters in such books continually grin like fools, shrug, and wash down their dinner. They love telling backstories, and they hold paranoid imaginings of future possibilities. They exhibit clinical signs of a histrionic personality disorder. They are supposed to have a fatal flaw too, at least according to rules found in poor writing books. Mass market novels are bowling balls, big, heavy, loud, and good for one purpose comparing them to other bowling balls is hardly worth one’s time.Ĭharacters in such books are generally stuck on their idée fixe, which they must pursue relentlessly even against logic. series must be about the same as FD, each book about the same as another, and for that matter about the same as about anything by Stephen K., Margaret A., and Dean K., or any of them. Add a few names and scenes to my example of cliche ridden idiomatic junk above and you have about any book of this mass market least-common-denominator genre including Fevre Dream. If you thought the above was a quote from the book Fevre Dream, good for you, you have a nose for rotting mass market meat. I find it a dog and pony show, but to each his own.
In the end it’s all’s well that end’s well so we can breatheĪ sigh of relief. His head, scared stiff, but he gets the answer in the nick of time. Learns the hard way - so much for all talk and no action, a baptism byįire. He he’s as tough as nails and ugly as sin. Advertisement in The Moving Picture World for the American drama film The Silent Battle (1916).
0 kommentar(er)
