Burning Everyone
Jim Bliss at The Quiet Road has posted a very kind review of my short novel Security, about twenty-four hours in the life of a defender of Western values. Since the writing of it was among the more splenetic periods in a generally ulcerated year, I'm paradoxically encouraged at the "dollop of resignation" which Jim detects in the book's tone. Although he brushes off my thanks in the comments, I stand by them and reiterate them here; the ultimate success of a work depends at least as much on sensitive reading as on competent execution, and the one is about as easy to come by as the other.
2 Comments:
At 1:01 pm ,
Buck Theorem said...
I myself thought "Security" was a fine and unsettling piece of work. I have thought about it a lot since reading it and I found the "dollop of resignation" entirely appropriate, given the subject matter. I felt you were, disturbingly, right on the money, as it were. It is likely my favourite piece of yours so far, or at least it is the one I have most often mentioned to friends.
At 7:59 pm ,
Philip said...
Thanks again. I certainly didn't feel resigned while writing it; in fact, a major worry was that the narrative voice would be excessively snide and the protagonist too one-dimensionally unsympathetic, precisely because the whole thing was written in what was essentially a seven-week self-righteous strop.
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