July 8th, 2024 - Kaho

Dear TNY,

“Kaho” is another story from this year’s fiction issue and I read it!  These are facts!

I spent a good portion of the day doing vehicle maintenance on my youngest son’s new car.  New to us anyway.  Which was fun.  Mildly challenging.  I’m glad we did the gear oil because the transmission shifts so much better now. 

Anyway, I read “Kaho”.  I thought the first sentence was a real banger.  A hook straight out of early T.C. Boyle or the gritlords of the 80’s.  And I dug the first scene.  It was interesting.  A new idea.  A fucking scene!  It’s hard to find scenes in the shit you normally print.  So, huzzah! 

But then I got a lump of backstory that didn’t fucking matter and took the reader out of the momentum-building that the first scene initiated.  Then we fall back into scene with the woman and the guy again, and that was great.  A new twist.  Simple writing that didn’t get in the way of the interaction the two people were having.  And then…it just fucking shit the bed.  I was pretty curious as to how the story was going to turn out.  Where was this woman going?  Would she wind up with the guy?  Was he tricking her again?

Nah. How about we just drop the goddamn ball and have her write a kid’s book that really resonates with the reader about true beauty!  This is the second story I have read from this year’s fiction issue and the messages are coming through loud and clear, boys.  Ham-fisted, some would say.

What else was good?  It was a reasonable 4.5k words.  The other two fuckstick stories are over 10k each.  Maybe they aren’t fuckstick stories, though.  But odds are pretty good they are (one definitely is as I found out in post).

Anyway, this story wasn’t terrible.  But the end was shit.

Later.

Nick