Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Girl with Ears and Demon with Limp — 2 stars

A couple months back I took a writing class. My teacher was, of course, an author, and over the course of the class I got interested in his books. I ended up buying his fourteen-page short story, Girl with Ears and Demon with Limp. It’s only available as an e-book, but I thought it would give me a taste of his writing so I’d know whether I wanted to read more. Plus, he’s a fairly new author, and I figured a local author would be a nice change from someone who's been published by one of the big publishing houses. Call it an experiment.

Girl with Ears and Demon with Limp is about a girl with wolf ears who is thrown into a castle that has gateways to other worlds and other dimensions. Wandering through the castle, she comes across a lame madman from another worlds who knows the way out. Together, they fight their way through monsters and worse until at last they stumble through a door that leads back to the wolf girl’s home. The adventure is brief but packed with action and eventful occurrences. Emotion is running high, the pace is fast, and the story never stops or slows down for the entire fourteen pages.

Unfortunately, I had several problems with the story. Besides the fact that I was somewhat surprised to find the girl with ears was only seven years old—and killing monsters left and right—there were things about the setting and style of writing that prevented me from really getting into it.

A castle that goes on forever? Filled with doors leading to other worlds and populated by monsters and outcasts? It sounded like a really intriguing setting. In actual fact, it was kind of confusing. I had a hard time keeping track of where the wolf girl was and what her surroundings looked like. I couldn’t really envision what was going on in my head, and so to a certain extent, I felt like I was just reading words on a page. And the words themselves were probably my biggest issue. Rathke chose his words, grammar, and even punctuation to create a strong sense of surrealism that borders on meaninglessness. As far as I can tell (from sampling a few other short stories he’s written) this is just his way of writing. And for a short story, this is a great way to make the story stand out and be memorable.

Unfortunately, it was these same qualities that made Girl with Ears and Demon with Limp impossible for me to connect with. I was so distracted by the unusual punctuation, irregular grammar, and word choice that I couldn’t stay in touch with the story itself. I’m very, very used to reading books that pretty much follow the rules of English grammar and punctuation. To me, Rathke’s book was visually shocking because it looked so strange on the page. And, to be honest, I don’t really read short stories a whole lot, so I’m not used to the brevity and small scope of fictional works that size.

For those of you who enjoy books with that surreal quality, Girl with Ears and Demon with Limp or pretty much any of Rathke’s books are probably right up your alley. He writes surrealism very, very well. I will point out that his writing is all pretty adult, and even Girl with Ears is on the mature end of YA fiction. Just because it didn’t work for me doesn’t mean it was written badly, though, because it wasn’t. Rathke did an excellent job with that story—it just didn’t strike a chord with me, and I found his writing style distracting. But for only a dollar on Kindle, it was worth reading to for something that isn’t mainstream.

Link to author website: http://edwardjrathke.com/ (kinda mature)
Link to Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/edward-j-rathke/e/B00I7TS39G/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1