Oct 9, 2013: Peculiar Memories is a series of shorts, posted on what appears to be a once a month schedule. He shares his experiences as a daydreamer, in a setting that appears to blur fantasy and reality, with strange happenings here and there. Meeting strangers that are a little too strange.

The imagery is evocative, but presentation proves the biggest barrier to entry. The site is bright, with a white background and light-ish gray text, and every entry falls into the same pattern of six to ten thick, dense paragraphs of 200-800 words.

Author Jason Macias tagged the story as postmodern, and I can see the elements of stream of consciousness and liberal interpretations of reality. The tag, then, is definitely accurate, but the nature of the rambling writing couples with the dense paragraphs and the gray text on white to make it hard to read. My eyes couldn’t consistently run from sentence to sentence, and it was harder still to find my place in the midst of a paragraph if I happened to get distracted or lost.

Standalone sentences ranged from the overly dry to the imaginative, and most of the entries seemed fairly inventive in terms of what was happening. The entries I didn’t like were the ones that were wholly focused on the author, reading more like someone’s experiences in psychedelics (psychically experiencing ‘oneness’ with the internet, for example).

I found it a bit of a slog, but I suspect it could improve by leaps and bounds if it focused a little more on more relatable experiences and took just one or two steps to make it readable, such as by breaking up the paragraphs and paragraph length.

4 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Help us improve!  Request an invite or log in to rate this review.