July 8th, 2019 - Uncle Jim Called

Dear TNY,

So you published “Uncle Jim Called” and you are proud of yourself?

Like, this thing is 1) some kind of ghost story, and unless it’s Scrooged it should never be consumed (you know, a certain Pulitzer Prize winning author once had a ghost story selected for BASS a while back; that story made me want to kill myself because that Cleveland Steamer was what literature was coming to).  Also, this story is 2) a huge POV/exposition garbage dump.  Let’s get into that.

Oh, real quick, I started skimming this as soon as I hit the below information.  And I lightly skimmed after that.  What’s the point?

So the following is an excerpt from the story that derails any suspension of disbelief:

Still, why had they called?

Now, the astute readers will ask themselves, why does the author choose to write this?  Why does the narrator ask this?  And I did that.  I tried to see what the rationale was behind this poorly-masked leading question.  And then I read further and confirmed that, yep, this is written in first person past tense.  So you see, TNY, the narrator already knows why they call because the POV is past tense.  He’s already lived the whole fucking story and he knows what’s going to happen.  So this question, then, is just authorial intrusion in the form of exposition, and doesn’t actually move the story forward.  In fact, it makes the question irrelevant because we now know that the narrator is some kind of fucking idiot for not being able to remember why they called or any other answers for the acres of questions in the exposition, so what’s the point of continuing on?  It takes a special kind of storytelling to take the premise of “why are dead people calling me” and derail it so gloriously.

So, fuck it.  I don’t have to finish this trash. 

As always, I’m astonished that readers pay you for these stories.  Most of the time I feel like you guys are dumpster diving at McDonald’s and selling it as haute cuisine.

Eat one dick.  Take a break.  Then eat another.

Nick