SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about A Field Guide to Ugly Places, by Patrick Samphire, with illustrations by Liz Clarke
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Vylar Kaftan
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What a wonderful story. The voice is strong, and the emotional resonance is powerful. This passage in particular will remain with me for a long, long time:
"Places like these," the woman said, taking a bite of her sandwich. "They're like a pin through the heart of a butterfly. They hold a town down. They kill it. A town can't recover until you pull out the pin. Then it might fly again. It might live."
I also especially liked the idea of the two kinds of marriages. Great story--I hope to see more from Patrick Samphire.
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Patrick Samphire
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Thanks, Vylar. I'm really pleased you liked the story.
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StephenB
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Hi Patrick. I liked the story and I liked where you're going with it. But I have one piece of advice or criticism based on my reading. I felt that the characters weren't always realistically developed in the bar scenes. Now I understand that this is a surealistic and symbolic story. But why wouldn't the bartender know the narrator's name at the bar he frequented for a year? If he was a regular good customer, you'd think he'd get his name when developing a superficial rapport. I have experience in that industry, so I guess that's why. But maybe you intended that as part of the whole urban decay? Where even the relationships between barfly and bartender have eroded?
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Jules Noble
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What a wonderful wonderful story.
Beautifully paced description of collapse and recovery, and with no cliche end just a march into the future. The links between human social decay and decay of landscape work fine, and the switches between the two are nicely and simply handled.I particularly liked the distraught protagonists slow recogniton of external events improving outside of himself. Nice narrative style.
Unlike another commenter I felt the bar people were correctly drawn, just the the normal night residue.
I also particularly liked the "woman", who shows just those hints of herself as actual perhaps quirky character that the protagonist might see, and is not merely an agent of change. The crush the protagonist starts to develop on her is also nicely judged.
Nice illustations too, dear Illustrator.
Well Done
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Patrick, I enjoyed this story so much. Thanks to SH for publishing it.
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