I don’t know about you, but the I’ve always been told that publishers don’t want novels that make readers do the work. We, the writers, must accommodate them, explaining ourselves, “writing to the end user,” and dumbing down intellectual content. My novels are intelligent, I hope, but accessible, I pray. Clearly this bit of publishing boilerplate doesn’t apply to everyone. I recently finished reading Empty Space: A Haunting , by M. John Harrison. I do enjoy ghost stories, and this may have been one, I think. I’m not really sure what it was. I had to work for this novel. The book had been recommended to me on a list of scary books. It’s hard to be scared when you can’t figure out what’s going on. My confusion settled in almost immediately. Lingo, jargon, and the use of words in ways I didn’t recognize made the action, if any, difficult to discern. The characters were interesting—memorable even. It was depressi...
Blog of a struggling writer.