I have been a bad blogger.
In July, I read a post on boingboing that offered a free copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction digest if I would only blog about it. I jumped… free is free, right? A $4.50 value, too, for just a few minutes of my time.
I received my copy in early August, but at that point I was hip-deep in Revolutionary America and couldn’t break away to read anything. If I had to put off Harry Potter for this course, there would be no way could I interrupt it for a magazine.
Tonight I received a very polite email asking me if I had blogged about it and neglected to inform them, and would I please do so? Thanks ever so much. Conscience struck. The magazine was sitting unmolested right next to my monitor — most likely the safest place because there’s so much other stuff here.
I opened the magazine (think Reader’s Digest, with stories strictly in the fantasy/sci-fi realm) to a random page and found a story called Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack In the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers by John Langan.
This is a post-apocalyptic tale of two people trying to survive against whatever it was that destroyed the planet. Think The Stand, with vegetation vice virus, with a superhero kick — instead of a battle between supreme beings, we have two twenty-year-old protagonists, one eight months pregnant, the other her best friend and geeky Batman fan, and an enemy known as the pack.
The Stand is told in over a thousand pages; Last Stand is told in 27. Thus, there’s quite a bit left to the imagination. That’s always enjoyable to me; sometimes less is indeed more. The story is told vividly enough to show you what IS, and what WAS in the case of the flashbacks. They how and why is left up to you.
The story, the WHOLE STORY, is this:
After three days and nights on the run, they managed to pull ahead of the pack, cross the bridge, set up camp on the other shore, and were preparing an ambush. Jackie sat waiting for Wayne. The sun was hot. Later, Wayne returned long enough to pick up some rope and return to the bridge. When he was done with his final trap, he came back and built a fire. They ate dinner in silence, then cleaned the guns and settled down for the night. Jackie’s sleep was light, troubled; once, she woke, saw Wayne sitting at the fire, and went back to sleep. In the early morning Wayne woke her for the second watch. Just before dawn, the Pack came. It was over quickly, and after, Jackie set out north. By nightfall, they had traveled far.
That’s the whole story. Except here’s the thing: Everywhere you see a punctuation mark, there’s backstory and details. Wherever you see a period, the sentence ends. I’m not kidding — sentences run a page and a half or more. The story is written like this:
…there was a pickup whose cab was empty, but it was boxed against the railing by a trio of smaller cars, as if they’d brought it to bay there –
– set up camp on the other shore –
–on a ledge overlooking the spot where the bridge slotted into the steep hills on the western shore of the Hudson…
It’s a very interesting method of writing, and the style as much as the story kept me hanging on for the 27 pages he took to tell the tale. An English major would cringe, an English teacher would flunk him for the assignment. I’ll give it a solid “B”.
