November 5th, 2018 - Backpack

Dear TNY,

“Backpack” is a runner right from the start.  The first paragraph has such grip.  It snatches your interest with its list of items (and how they were procured; so oddly) and then keeps you pulled in the whole time.  The story reminds me of a truncated version of East of the Mountains by Guterson, which I also liked.

What I didn’t really like was the Hall & Oates stuff. It didn’t flow with the rest of the story very well.  It probably could have, but I felt the only tying factor between present and past was the t-shirt which seems like authorial cleverness and not reality.  Like, why of all t-shirts, did he choose the Hall & Oates one for the gun?  Because the author needed him to.  I also thought that his plan fell apart a little to cleanly.  As in, he had so much resolve and then in the space of a few lines of dialog he left with Carmen.  It wasn’t convincing enough and felt like someone was driving (author) not reality rolling out.  The same goes for his reason to kill himself to begin with.  I don’t get the rationale for that.  Not that I need super specific or cliché reasons for him to kill himself, but I need to feel the same way I do about his list of items and thoroughness in planning as I do about his reason to do it.

Even with those things, this story is a stark departure from the absolute fucking trash you have been printing lately, so thank you.  I did form a tiny tear in the last paragraph so you won me over there. It’d be nice to see more work like this and less work like…I don’t know…everything else you print.

Later.

Nick