“The young ones smiled through their hunger and dreamed only of biting the horizon, of the great iron machines eating up earth beneath their wheels, and of freedom.” There’s a Steinbeck-esque feel between these pages, to the Great Depression backdrop to the broken down automobiles to the darkness creeping in on the edges. Problem is,…
“‘When we die, we don’t cease to exist or turn into shimmering motes of ectoplasm or purple angels or anything else you may have been brought up to believe. We just…go on living. Someplace else.’” I oftentimes feel like I can tell when a book is objectively good or not. Yes, there are personal biases…
A term that many times fascinates readers is the idea of darkness. It dances in the shadows, plays with our fears. We find it comforting that we can stand up to the presumed evil in books, simply by reading about them. But this is not a dissertation dealing with subconscious findings of all things dark…
“You’re broke, eh?” “I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.” This is the novel that penned the hardboiled genre, giving greatness to short, snappy sentences and tough anti-heroes. What this is not, however, is a noir novel. One is defined by the terse sentence structure, the tarter…
Acerbic Writing 