The Fifty Year Sword

           

     The rundown is as follows: While The Fifty Year Sword is a great book and a good example of Mark Z. Danielewski's unique way of telling a story while turning it inside out, the gimmick of five separate narrators overlapping with different-colored quotation marks actually takes away from the story. By cluttering the relatively-short book with an unneeded visual gimmick, Danielewski does himself a disservice and creates a minor turn-off for people who would normally be into this kind of book. In its favor is the fact that it's essentially a children's book for adults, and hiding under the simplistic language is a genuinely creepy story that even when you guess the eventual ending manages to hold its tone and deliver something chilling. Despite the gimmick, the childlike language coupled with the eerie imagery creates a horror story that is at once instantly engaging and easy to understand. 

           The bad bit of course is the gimmick, which obscures a really cool book by having five people talk in nested quotation marks to tell a story. Please, once and future authors who read this blog, don't ever do this. Don't ever have your narrators narrate nested like this. More, as always, below.