h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: True story - A1125758
Author: Hideo - U220110

...?

All true, eh?

and some of it even *happened*! double-

However that may be, i love the way this is written. I don't know what kind of comments you might be interested in having, beyond that I enjoyed reading it; but some are, anyhoos...

The style is fluid and the narrator has a well established 'voice', starting strongly with a dramatic opening then melts into starry-eyed nostalgia of romantic depucelage.

But you don't let the reader get bored; we move straight into the all too human disillusionment of adeloscent relationships...

... which in itself doesn't last long; revenge, violence, social issues and mob reactions race by in the blink of an eye in your cleverly formatted 'freeze frame' - shades of the film-maker there, i feel...

And then we find that all of this has really just been the prelude to a very different tale! Great stuff!

And i'd say it's a dangerous route to take; the reader was just getting involved with one story when you present us with something wildly different, and let's face it, the occult is not everyone's cuppa cha.

But i think it works well here. You leave us dangling on the fate of Pastey-face, tipping us off that if we take the time to read the build-up, there is a pay-off coming. I like that.

I can hardly go through para by para and say what i liked, though, now can i? So i'll leave at that, perhaps adding that in particular i like the way that almost all of the characters have something to them. No-one is 2D in the world you describe (i especially liked the dynamic between narrator and the girl in the book shop - nothing is going on, but you describe some of what bubbles under the surface of all such passing interactions, .

Well, the short answer was, fact or fiction, i like it,

Do you write often? Or what i really mean is, are you planning to write more here? I think you'll find quite a few people on h2g2 enjoy sharing this kind of writing, so i hope we'll hear more from you in the future.

all the best
spiff

I think this is a great story! Most of it sounds far-fetched enough to be fiction, but I can believe *some* of it

spiff has a much more thorough explanation of why he likes it, but I simply do . It left me thinking. Mostly about whether it could be true

Well done. I enjoyed it

Woooooow! That was good.

I read it and liked it. I hope the narrator of the story isn't you, because it might offend when I say what a spineless coward he seems to me. An anti-hero, I like that.

That's an interesting reading of it, wild rose uk. Can you expand on why you think that, why he comes across that way?

Outstanding Hideo, absolutely brilliantly written. Thank you very much for posting this

The occult and revengeful voilence are definitely not my cup of tea, so it says all the more about the writing and the story telling that I stayed facinated to the end. It's atmospheric and gripping.

Usually I need to feel sympathetic to at least someone, or something, in a story to stay interested. Perhaps the initial sympathy with the narrator was enough to engage with.

Hideo, is your question to wildrose purely one of interest, or could her answer make you want to change anything?

As KJ said, thanks for posting it here.
Waz

My question is mostly one of interest, because if the effect is to unsettle, it's working, I guess, so I probably wouldn't change it unless someone said 'this didn't work because de dah de dah de dah'. But I'm genuinely interested to know other people's reading of this. I'm obviously too close to it as the writer to be objective Like, you were /initially/ sympathetic with the narrator. When/why did you lose that? Glad you liked it, thanks!

Oh, and if anyone other than wild rose uk thought the same way, can you let me know why? Thanks!

If what you wanted was to unsettle, it works! Very well.

But just for your interest, and this is just one reader's reaction, here's my rambling on why I lost the initial sympathy I wanted to have for the boy.

To have any sympathy with a character who 'cursed a woman unto death and a man unto a life of misery without her.' I need to be make allowances. I think I'm making allowances for the extremes of a teenage boy's hurt feelings. At the piece progresses there's a sense of time moving on and I start to feel he should be gaining perspective and maturity. Also the piece sounds as if it's written by a man, not a boy, so he's grown up, but he expresses no feelings at the outcome - that's disturbing. So the allowances I make for youth at the beginning disappear bythe end.

I also need to feel the the hurt warrants the revenge. What did the girl do? She used the boy then spurned him. Nasty, but the boy did get revenge by the comment, unexplained but effective we're told, about her father. Wasn't that enough given that he'd known she was engaged and was therefore forwarned of her untrustworthiness? Now I think I'm being unfair, that the boy was really hurt by her. But we're not told he was in love with her. And his actions weren't spur of the moment. Also the boy's ability to be restrained are shown in the flick knife bit. So he begins to come over more calculating.

Summing it up, to maintain sympathy with the used boy I need to feel he's acting unthinkingly out of great hurt. As the piece progresses the boy's character comes over as colder and more calculating (starting with the flick knife bit) than that. It could be that the girl caused this but "I'm working class scum who ..."etc. says he was not a naive beforehand. So my reservations started with the flick knife incident and were confirmed by the lack of any regret expressed by the, now adult, narrator of the story.

That really is a ramble, but I need to log off and might not get back online for a couple of weeks, so I'm posting anyway. Hope some of it's intelligible. Oh, and what you have here is much more interesting than a boy 'acting unthinkingly out of great hurt' would be (imo).
Waz

Most interesting feedback. Thanks!

"some of it even happened" eh?

I don't normally comment on fiction here because so much of it is derivitive SF, and a lot of the rest is fairly weak. This is neither, though Waz's comment reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye (which I haven't read for a couple of decades at least): "he expresses no feelings at the outcome - that's disturbing"

It works, mostly. It works well despite the dis-joint in the narrative. You appear to be fairly robust in your ability to take commentary, so I will add that I find the cause-and-effect over-blown. However like Spiff, I like the details about the minor characters - the shop girl and the homeless guy. You can string a sentence or two together, and that's for sure.

A spineless coward? Well, if all of it actually happened, then I would describe the boy as a scorpio. Revenge is best served cold, and all that. One of the things that makes it work is that there is no indication of the boy's reaction - surprise? shock? guilt? remorse? satisfaction? I like writing which makes me work. But one of the things which weakens the piece is the voodoo - that sort of thing, especially following a declaration of scepticism, is a cop-out.

"And then he woke up and it was all dream..."

Yeah right.

However - thanks for posting it here. If any of it had actually happened, it would stay in my mind for a while.

B

that was cool - a good read. Guess i read it coz i do practise magik, but not to that extent... if its true (coz it seems too farfetched to be yet...) then what about the law?

What you send out comes back to you by the power of three?

Anyway - it was well written and i really enjoyed it.

He seems a coward to me for a few reasons. Despite having a knife, and being surrounded by his allies, he choses to get his revenge from a distance.

The main reason is that he felt that he had to get revenge for an affair that finished. It takes courage to fix a broken heart, if his was broken, and he preferred revenge. I'd never felt before that revenge was the act of a coward, someone afraid to face up to rejection.

Don't think that I didn't like it, I did. Very much.

I enjoyed the story.

Thanks for the effort.

There's a slight error "He books he sells..." should be "The books he sells ..."

T

The story...pretty heavy. Dunno about that, really

But as a piece of writing, certainly pretty good. Powerful tale, understated but well paced. An uncomfortable but compelling read.

Thanks!

Pin

Ditto all of the above great read, dark subject not my usual tipple but certainly enjoyed. Thanks for pointing this one out Panther lady...*waves* to the gang.
take care
boots

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