Through Seven Stars by Evan Sehr

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Lester Curtis
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Through Seven Stars by Evan Sehr

Post by Lester Curtis »

This is a very well-written story, but it's a bit jarring in the way it ends: there's no denouement; it just stops, right at the peak of its conflict. We know the good guy dies; we presume the bad guy does . . . okay, a tragic balance, but . . . we're conditioned to expect more to an ending than that. As it is, the reader has fallen with the hero and splatted, and that's it. And that violates our conditioned expectation.

If this were printed on paper, I'd be turning the page looking for an epilogue.
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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Robert_Moriyama
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Re: Through Seven Stars by Evan Sehr

Post by Robert_Moriyama »

Lester Curtis wrote:This is a very well-written story, but it's a bit jarring in the way it ends: there's no denouement; it just stops, right at the peak of its conflict. We know the good guy dies; we presume the bad guy does . . . okay, a tragic balance, but . . . we're conditioned to expect more to an ending than that. As it is, the reader has fallen with the hero and splatted, and that's it. And that violates our conditioned expectation.

If this were printed on paper, I'd be turning the page looking for an epilogue.
I added the line about Hroth looking... smaller... after he lost his amulet. While it was not overtly stated that magic was at work, the fact that Ojin aged from a young man to (apparently) a senior citizen, while Hroth remained seemingly unchanged, led me to believe that in stripping Hroth of his necklace (Ojin would have preferred that he had taken Hroth's head off, but oh well...), Ojin at the very least made him mortal (and vulnerable to his own men, who may have been pretty tired of working for him), and at best may have caused the decades to catch up with him. At least that's the way I would like to interpret it.

(Also, the Soprano family got a nice surprise when the goons from a rival faction delivered a lovely retirement gift for Tony -- tickets for a round-the-world cruise and the keys to a new house in Florida! Hey, fade to black could mean that, right?)

RM
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London (1876-1916)
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