Feb 11, 2012: I’ve been enjoying The Points Between since its launch. I’ve found it mysterious, evocative, and suspenseful. It’s a story about the veil between the real world and the magical world, and the beauty and mortal danger of passing between. This is an ancient theme, but taking place somewhere in the southern USA, the story has both a mythic and everyday modern air. The theme is old, but the implementation is original. I have some guesses about what’s going on, but am still being surprised by new twists in the tale.

The story is written in third person, from the point of view of Matthew, a young artist who stumbles into one of those places where you should be careful not to eat the pomegranate. Matthew is a person who feels more than thinks, and the way the story is narrated seems to give his surface thoughts but not necessarily all his deeper feelings and motivations. This makes it a little hard to get a grip on him, but adds to the surreality and sense of mystery.

The story starts with Matthew getting out of his car by the side of the road on a whim and then stumbling around in the dark through a ditch and a grove of trees (that don’t seem to want to let him through!). Chris found this opening overly wordy, and while I see what he means, it worked for me. It was atmospheric, immediate, and once he got into the trees, downright eerie. I also found some of the other descriptive passages in the story wonderfully vivid, for example when Matthew is walking through a town in a pre-dawn fog. See what you think . . . 

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Dec 4, 2011: The opening chapters—and much of the narrative, in fact—are very loosely written. Most of the first chapter, for instance, involves the main character getting out of his car and crossing a ditch . . . described in lifeless, repetitive-sounding, declarative sentences. It’s not a short chapter, either.

My recollection of Pay Me, Bug!, the author’s previous work, was that it relied much more on dialogue than narrative, and perhaps that is why it felt so much tighter. There are such sections in The Points Between, where things seem to liven up, but the loose, very self-conscious narrative always eventually returns.

Unfortunately, the story needs some significant editing before I can recommend it to an audience.

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