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Home stretch now – it seems like there's plenty of ground left to cover, but much of it is pretty basic descriptions of violence – these are, paradoxically, inoffensive, but also not particularly in need of critique – they would sit perfectly well in a novel by Chris Ryan or similar, and do their job perfectly well. Where things do get more complex is where curlicues or baroque touches. For example:
Sweat, now more sour, (for it had been strengthened with Fear, had it not?) flew in a fine mist into the atmosphere of the room like dandelion spores. This gave the room an odd, wispy look.
Of course, the sweat was already sour – see top of page – so why it is more sour, and indeed how Fear (Jack Fear, presumably, or maybe Judge Fear) had managed to make it so very much more sour in such a brief time. The technique used to explain the addition of this flabby datum is known as apostrophe - literally, a turning away. In this case, the narrator turns away from the action to ask us, the readers, a rhetorical question. For no reason whatever. It does not strengthen the narrative, and once again it shows a failure to understand structure – in a scene in which a charmingly odd couple are killing the entire guest list of an orgy, the action is held up for the deployment of a rhetorical device to make us focus on what the sweat smelled like. You may wonder why this should be so important. I may wonder with you.
I mentioned smiling a bit above as an example of incongruous, workaday phrasing. This example, going from the positively epic (for it had been strengthened with Fear, had it not?), to what sounds like copy for a surveyor's report on some net curtains (this gave the room an odd, wispy look). This achieves the state of bathos - generally defined as a sudden transition from the sublime to the ridiculous – but not apparently for any particular reason. Editing usually picks up this sort of thing, but it must be difficult to edit when one believes that there cannot possibly be anything wrong with one's first draft.
More violence, Little Hawksmoor getting a damn good polishing, and then one of those adventurous moments.
All at once, the almost preternatural beauty she’d held moments before fell away like a cheap disguise. In her laughter and glee, her lips became tight and deeply lined, pulling back from her too white teeth in a grimace of inhumanity. Her curved, sexy thighs became thick trunks that set her into the floor like some ancient death machine. Her hair was a black veil that whipped in an arc through the air. Her arms and eyes flew here and there, mowing down twenty adults in sixty seconds.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, imagine being killed by a woman whose eyes and arms fly here and there, each one equipped with a tiny lawnmower. Pretty terrifying, isn't it? It is also probably more likely than being able to shoot, reload and wind a crossbow twenty times (minimum) in sixty seconds, but I imagine that a professor of toxology was most impressed by this section, so stet.
Bill simply fired his weapon over and over again. Only his eyes
betrayed his state of mind.
Well, his eyes and the way he is discharging a high-caliber firearm into people. But mainly the eyes.
The smell of Death was thick and foul in the air.
“All right?” Wilma said to Bill as she lowered her weapon, looking out upon the Death Room and her former targets.
And we're back to the capitals. In this case, it seems Death> will be joining Ultimate Vice, Ultimate Abandonment of Redemption and Ultimate Spider-Man on the perfume counters of our department stores. The Death Room is presumably where one puts the overstock. It's a fragrance for a man.. or a woman. Or a Sexy Party. One danger of these capitals is that they make these words so loud that even the characters can hear them, and start to pick up phrases from the narrator.
“Maybe we will,” Wilma said, still grinning. “I’m getting quite tired of putting these little sex parties together, and not seeing a damned positive result out of all the hard work at the end.”
She turned and walked from the doorway with not another word. The crossbow hung from her belt, and it bumped and bounced on her rather impressive backside as she walked away.
That's a rather elaborate crossbow, lest we forget, on a rather impressive backside. Rather!
From amid the blanket of smoke and death that permeated (more permeation – see top of page) the room, something stirred.
It was a young white woman.
Her dark, long hair was frazzled and stood on end. There were beads of blood and bits of bone and flesh in her hair and on her face and naked body. She breathed like a horse that’d been run and whipped to the absolute edge of physical breakdown.
A double here – an overcomplex simile and a strangely conversational narrator (that'd).
Tilda Harris had been invited to a Sex Party by a couple of maniacs with a mad mad-on against sex and fun, apparently. Her mind was a hurricane of panic, confusion, and terror. Hadn’t the woman who had tried to kill her (and who had in fact managed quite well in killing her partner and everyone else around her, for that matter) named Wilhelmina been her friend and co-worker for the past year? Hadn’t the two of them shared stories, laughs, and tears over the last year? Had the two of them not been damned near best friends?
Ah-hah! Here is plot. It's very lucky that in these situations one's first instinct is to recap all the action that occurred up to this moment, isn't it?
‘Time for thought and rationality, later,’ her mind screamed at her. ‘For now, Escape is the Grand Thought.’
And that one's second instinct is to do one's best to impersonate Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Hawksmoor seems to believe that criticism of this line is based around the idea that people are not lucid when under the threat of death. I would suggest it is rather that most people are not Prince Valiant when in such dire peril. Again, the tone of the narration has infected the characters. And yes, of course this is entirely intentional. It is not, however, good writing. It is, rather, the sort of thing that makes readers think that a writer cannot do characterisation.
There was a sudden Whisper upon the air, and Tilda Harris was thrown backward as an arrow drove itself through her throat and out the back of her neck> Tilda was thrown back into the final place of pleasure for twenty people, who had seen only happiness and good vibes in their immediate futures.
And so farewell, Tilda Harris. We hardly knew you. In fact, we didn't know you at all. You were thrown in at the end to generate a little extra pathos and provide a reason for a bit more guignol and another cracking mixed metaphor. Again, there's not much to say about this passage - it's fine for what it does.
And she followed Bill, even as he seethed with rage (and she thought of the best, most articulate way to invite her friend Trudy Wilson to a coke and acid party that she and Bill had been planning for some months) to whatever immediate destination Fate would lead them to next.
Again, we've got this problem of emphasis. The writer could have ended on an action sequence, with the death of Tilda Harris, but he wants to leave us with the knowledge that our heroes will do this again in the near future. That's a noble aspiration, but in fact is not achieved – after telling us this, the ending itself is a pointless, redundant meander - to whatever immediate destination Fate would lead them to next. It's a damp squib. If I were suggesting to the great man how to end this bloody blancmange, I might suggest a bit of direct speech in which Wilma chats about the possibility of another party as they quit the scene, but of course I would never presume so to do. Little Hawksmoor has spat its creamy venom, and we may finally rest. |
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