Postby Farseeker » Wed May 11, 2016 12:38 pm
Huh? Whazzup wit dis?
IMO this story had pretty much nothing going right for it.
The recording quality was awful. Distorted and echo-y. As for the narration itself, the style grated. The narrator seemed to be stuck doing some sort of impression of macho tough guy telling of exploits of a combat game - which might work if she was trying to use that tone to convey the personality of the main character, might have worked if she had restricted it to that character's dialogue, but when used consistently throughout the third-person narrative just got tedious and annoying.
As for the writing... Maybe it's a matter of taste, but this was just too surrealistic for me. It just sort of wandered from one scene to another aimlessly with no serious attempt to connect them. It introduced characters with no serious attempt to develop or integrate them. ("Who are you?" "I'm a writer.") ("Who is she?" "I don't know. She calls every once in a while.") ("I didn't know cats could talk." "They can't.") It felt like a junior high school assignment to write a short story where the student stitched together a lot of fantastic and inexplicable things and then wrapped it up with the "But then I woke up. It was all a dream!"
(Disclaimer: I had the same problem with Mur Lafferty's "Heaven" stories, which although they received some high acclaim I just couldn't stick with. Once you have a context in which absolutely anything can happen, motivation to understand what is happening vanishes for me, which in turn saps my inclination to pay attention to what is happening.)
I listen to podcasts while commuting. I was, I don't know, maybe halfway through the story when I got home yesterday, and I'm having a hard time convincing myself to continue with it on my way in this morning. Can't think of when that has happened on a Drabblecast before.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.