Huey Dusk(my first official review)

My first review of the original Huey Dusk was Luke warm. Here are some excerpts.

The world Whit has created is pretty fantastic, in every sense of that word. A world where clowns are real people, not just guys in make-up doing a job. You cut a clown, he bleeds white. A world where mimes really don’t speak.

By definition, a novella has less time than a novel to pull the reader in, and thusly it is imperative that the reader is captivated within the first half a page. Unfortunately I didn’t find Huey Dusk quite achieving that. This was in no small part due to the very choppy nature and static prose of the opening scenes. Nonetheless, there was still something in these scenes that made me want to know more. A clown who’s taking drugs just seconds before entertaining the children… Not your normal opening scenes, but certainly the kind that makes the reader want to plough on. I’m glad I did.

Due to the word count there’s a little less story in this novella than I would have liked. Indeed I felt it was a story with more promise, so much more I’d not been privy to. The world Whit has created is pretty fantastic, in every sense of that word. A world where clowns are real people, not just guys in make-up doing a job. You cut a clown, he bleeds white. A world where mimes really don’t speak.

What I liked about this review was that it was honest and picked up on all the parts that I hoped one would pick up on. He said the prose was static and choppy; I might have added dreamlike. When I originally wrote the story it was only meant to be a one paragraph piece of flash fiction. But I just kept adding to it paragraph by paragraph. It was intended to be expressionist art, so to speak, designed to be unsettling.

He also alluded to a paper thin plot. Again I started writing this story as a series of vignettes and realized I had something more. So, to me, the thin plot again makes this minimalist art and gives the story a very cultish vibe.

In subsequent stories, Huey has changed quite a bit, and I have never been able to recapture the magic of the original-- I'm not sure I want to. For those who want to form their own opinions about this story they can buy it either at www.untreedreads.com  or at www.amazon.com.