This is a published hook that has been forever memorable to me. I doubt many have read this, but if you have, you very well may remember this as well. I won't give attributions just yet, so as not to create preconceived notions.
I was curious what others thought of it.
quote:See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off.
posted
I love this style of prose, but think I couldn't pull it off if I tried. I also wonder if this particular author's work (and work of this type) is unpalatable to a sizeable proportion of the genre fiction audience.
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posted
Poetic. From this much, I expect the author to be able to deliver an excellent story in beautiful prose. I also expect it to be a "difficult" read, that is, one that will require more attention from me than most books. But I'll read on, because the style is unusual and I expect the rewards of paying that extra attention to be worth it.
If, however, the rewards are not great enough, I'll stop somewhere before the end, as I did with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Brilliant writer, but this tale didn't hold me sufficiently. (The failing is likely entirely mine.) I do plan to try it again when my children get older and I have a cacophony-free reading window longer than the ten minutes before my exhausted brain drops my head to my pillow.
posted
My first thought is, it is ancient, an older book, an older style that is not seen so much in today's popular fiction. But I tend to stick to my genre and then, to the voices, styles I like.
While the intro paints a haunting picture, thats all it does for me, I have no idea who or what the story is about. I need to have something in the first 13 that draws me in, the hook, and it doesnt mean action so to speak, but the Mc, the situation something.
For me, I would pass, as it would represent a hard read, and something I would most likely have to reread to figure out.
posted
The first 13 I posted came from this novel.
It was written in 1985, but takes place in the mid-1800s. The negatives are that it is a difficult (and as the title suggests, sometimes gruesome) read. On the positive side, it is fairly short and has in my mind one of the greatest villains in all of fiction. And being short, the action gets going pretty quickly.
Edited to add: the reading also gets easier within the first couple pages, but there are a couple of passages that remain (intentionally and frustratingly) ambiguous.
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Reziac - good call on Gormenghast. I feel the same way -- great trilogy, but man -- I will really need to be in the right mood to go through it again.
[This message has been edited by Wordcaster (edited February 21, 2011).]
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