I have a short story I need to make one more pass through before I send it off.   It’s a few days past its expected date, but it’s probably in the story’s best interest that I took the extra time. I just need to  let it percolate before a final polish.

Anyway, I was thinking about the suspension of disbelief in fiction. I’ve written stories about such things as zombies working in chicken processing plants, were-pugs, the holy grail for sale on e-bay, 15 foot salamanders in a suburban swimming pool, the devil (or a reasonable facsimile) in a 49 Buick, et al. All of which would require a certain “buy-in” on the part of the reader to make the story work.

What’s been driven into me time and again with speculative fiction is that, aside from the “speculative” portion of the story the rest of the work has to be internally consistent. I think this is true more so in genre works than mainstream. In mainstream writing a reader can put up with some inconsistencies as the story itself flows along with real life, but in speculative work, any inconsistent jarring throws the reader out of the story and ruins its effect as a whole.

I had this ably demonstrated a few weeks back while watching The Eye, this wretched Jessica Alba horror flick.

***Spoiler Alert***

This isn’t a new movie by any means so hopefully I won’t be ruining the story for anybody, but still, stop reading now if this sort of thing bothers you.

The Eye is, at best, mediocre suspense/horror movie but I was able to move along with it. The story centers on a blind violinist who begins having nightmarish visions after a double corneal transplant. I was able to immerse myself in this idea. I had completely bought into the speculative portion of the story until, near the end when it was revealed the transplants came from a suicide in that happened in this tiny little Mexican town hundreds of miles from the border.

What I guess was supposed to an intriguing part of the story instead worked on me the opposite way. I could accept the supernatural visions in the transplanted eyes but not that a woman committing suicide in this little village in Mexico somehow ended up with her corneas transplanted to a woman in a large city, in another country,  hundreds of miles away. It just didn’t work for me and threw me completely out of the story.

Now, I’m a lazy researcher and it may be that this sort of thing happens all the time, but it didn’t ring true in the non-speculative portion of the story. I think I could even have bought the idea if the writers had offered some real explanation as to how the corneas took such an unorthodox trip from point A to B, but they didn’t and, for me, the curtain was pulled aside.

What I think this demonstrates is that internal consistency is of paramount importance in speculative fiction. You can put the giant salamander in the pool, the possessed car on the highway, the rabid St. Bernard in the driveway, but every other aspect of your story needs to ring as true to real life as possible to keep the illusion rolling for the reader.

"For Want of a Nail" is up at The Absent Willow Review.

12 Hours early!

Read it here.

Any comments would be welcome.

Disclaimer—Dr. Kim Paffenroth is responsible for my first professional sale—see previous post.

 Nevertheless I’ll do my best to give an unbiased opinion of his zombie novel Dying to Live: a Novel of Life Among the Undead.

I have a pretty simple review process whether I’m thinking about movies, books, music, whatever: when I’m finished with a product do I feel like I’ve wasted my time? Would the few hours—or few days in the case of a book—been better spent doing something else?

None of us are getting any younger and I find myself with the refreshing, new-found, ability to turn off a bad movie, or stop—after a reasonable grace period—reading a bad book. I come across most new authors at the library. I work hard for my money and won’t waste it on an unknown quantity. However if their first book is good I have no qualms whatsoever about laying out the cash for their second.

All that said, here’s what you should know first about D2L: immediately on finishing it I ordered the sequel and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

In D2L the author has crafted a remarkable, thought provoking  tale hung on the fabric of a clichéd zombie apocalypse.  He takes this horrific premise and shows the reader an in-depth, incredibly believable look at the emotional and philosophical ramifications such an event would have on the average person. Despite this foray into the more intellectual side of a zombie apocalypse, the book doesn’t scrimp on the expected action and gore. There are scenes in these pages that made me wince and Dr. Paffenroth’s command of the English language is considerable. His tale moves swiftly with no real lull in the action, yet at the same time he is able to deliver full-fleshed main characters, men, women  and children that, as a reader, I had a vested interest in by the end of the book.

Not to say the book is perfect. The religious symbolism gets little heavy handed at times. At one point I fully expected one of the main characters to end up unintentionally crucified ala Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. Some of the secondary characters appear a little stilted and two dimensional and the development of the main character’s love interest at times rings hollow. But on the other hand the author has written a book which handily grapples with very large questions, the nature of humanity, the essential essence of evil, the resiliency of civilization, et.al, and with Zombies!

All in all this is what I can say about D2L—this book is filled with scene after scene and passage after passage I have been replaying in my mind time and again since I finished the last page. 

What more can be asked of a book?

And I’m checking the mail daily for my copy of Dying to Live: Life Sentence.