Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Day Two Hundred Twenty-One: "A Death in the Woods" by William Gay

Curiosity.

A man and his wife get involved in the investigation of a man found dead in the woods by their house. Was it murder? Was it suicide? What did his life mean if it meant anything? Why? The overarching question was "why"?

I liked this story in that it moved quickly but at times it was hard to follow since it lacked many dialogue tags. Several times I had to go back and make sure I knew who was talking and that for me is just too distracting, particularly in a short story like this where I don't have hundreds of pages of a certain voice to develop my own recognition upon reading. I do admire what the writer was trying to do with this but in the end, it made me not want to keep reading and I lost interest about halfway through it.

This makes me sad because I had high hopes for this writer. Maybe a different short story would yield different results for me. I'll try again to see if I can't be persuaded...but I won't be trying right now.

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