/lit/ - Literature

Tonight I read "the Dose Makes the Poison" by K-anon aka Kit Williams in about two and a half hours. I had missed the whole l&mp magazine during its first run but these are collected before the hiatus.

>the Bad
The author could have done without the "word from the author" or at least left out the couple quotes that get used in the stories. It's nice to know but the background gives the impression that most of the stories are not far from autobiographical and there's not much variety in temperament or theme like some short story collections have. With enough work this all could have been a single novelette. There are 9 spelling mistakes I caught in its 58 pages. A few annoying redundancies like "zeitgeist, the spirit of the age" which you would hope anyone that reads books wouldn't need the definition. All but one quote is preceded by a name-drop which I think was unnecessary. There are not enough stories and this would be the equivalent of 2 or 3 short stories of standard word count.

>the Good
K-anon has an intimate feel to his stories especially the monologues to the reader. His voice is suicidal, cynical but compassionate. The stories are bleak and rife with disappointment, vexation and regret. Nature is a major theme in the work, both instinct and entropy as forces that drive our lives forward in our quests for duty and recognition. While some of the passages seem cliche, a few hit me quite hard. The vocabulary is quite good and I found the variety of sentence structure satisfying. The best stories in this are all right in the middle: Longing, the Balcony, Burial of a Field Mouse, and Half of a Melody.

I'd give it 3/5, I liked it but not much. K-anon's first romp in literary fiction is brief. I won't comment much on the poetry at the end but it was fine to me, ornate and without any tired rhyme scheme. It's clear he's well-read but needs to adjust his process to output more stories and really develop his themes into something powerful. He needs to learn from Chekhov (I sensed some inspiration from him in "Burial of a Field Mouse") and other great shortform authors to look more closely at a variety of experiences that people face.