The official website of A. B. Gayle - Author and Editor
Share this:
  • Home
  • Latest News
  • My Books
  • Free Reads
  • Blogs
    • Tyler Knoll's Blog
    • Interviews
    • Reviews
  • Man 'em up Dude
    • Leather + Lace >
      • Chapter 1: Stand Back
    • Red + Blue >
      • R+B - Reviews & Blogs
    • Caught >
      • Caught - Reviews & Blogs
    • Initiation
  • SciFiRomance
    • WIP - Nature
  • Mainstream
    • In Search of the Perfect PinotG!
    • The Lost Diary of Thomas Kendall
  • Coming Soon
    • WIP - Home+Away
    • WIP - Pride+Prejudices
    • WIP - Truth+Lies
  • Bio
    • Links
  • Editing Info
    • Editing Special Forces

An excellent example of the Unreliable First Person Narrator

1/27/2011

0 Comments

 
StrayStray by Ash Penn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I nearly didn't finish "Stray" because the narrator seemed such a prick. Then I did something I blush to admit. I read the end of the book and saw who he ended up with.

Then it was a case of WTF. So I kept reading. I soon learned that here we had a classic case of the first person unreliable narrator. Yes, our hero, Terry did some pretty despicable things and was out and out shitty to Daniel, but he was his own worst critic.

In these sorts of stories, nobody can be taken at face value, or in this case the narrator's value. Most of all themself!

People have commented on how impossibly sweet Dan is. Yes, because that's how Terry sees him. Right from the start you get phrases like this:
The boy studied me from beneath dark lashes, his fair hair contrasting with the black shirt hanging loosely from his shoulders.
That phrasing and word choice immediately shows someone he's attracted to or he wouldn't notice those things. Again:
His eyes, I noted, were a stormy shade of blue-grey. His face verged on the cherubic
and then a bit further on:
He raised his face, all flushed cheeks and glowing smile.
So, he says he's not interested, but he continually betrays the fact that he is, right from the start.

The kid is keen on him and isn't backward in coming forward. Like one of those puppies who doesn't know the meaning of rejection. So Terry feels he shouldn't be attracted to someone like him, so he pushes him away as hard as he can, by being as horrible as he can. Still the kid persists.

Why? One: maybe he's not as white as the driven snow that Terry makes him out to be. He was after all the king of cock sucking back at school and did survive on the street for quite a while.

But maybe it's more that he sees in Terry a similar spirit. But one in denial. In fact Terry is more like the neglected mongrel in the pound who has been abused and hurt and snarls at any attempt to be kind. In a way they end up protecting each other.

Terry also sees his friend, Marc, as the love of his life. If Terry was as much a prick as he makes himself out to be, why then has Marc hung around all these years?

True, Marc, isn't exactly your strong, sensitive character, even if he may be so physically. Perhaps it is this aura of strength that attracts Terry. He admits he likes his men to have:
thick, solid muscle, ropy veins, and enough stamina to pound me into a weeklong orgasm.
He, himself, though was small:
he and I were more or less the same size. In a more charitable frame of mind I might have offered to lend him some of my clothing.
So Terry had toughened himself up over the years in order to survive. He thought Daniel needed to do the same, but when it came to the crunch, he stepped in to protect him, not once but twice.

Time and again, circumstances left him smelling less than rosy, but instead of defending himself he encouraged Dan to believe the worst to help keep him at arm's length.

There are faults in the story eg at one point, as quoted above, Terry says that he likes men who pound him into an orgasm and yet later we get this statement:
It had been a good few months since I'd last got fucked, and I'd always preferred to pitch, but what the hey? It was his birthday. “Go for it.”
The other bits that made me pause were his sudden change from protestating that he didn't want to help Dan and be nice to him and immediately doing so when he felt Dan was being encouraged to feeling ashamed about being gay. Perhaps a little more insight as to why he felt so protective of Dan at those times might have helped.

Anyway these are minor quibbles and are easily outweighed by the courage of Ash in creating guys who aren't perfect and yet makes them sympathetic. She has also created a pretty believable world for them to live in. They go to work, they lose their jobs, they have to clean up. The mundane is as much a part of the story as the angst is.

One of the biggest lessons writers need to learn when they write these "nasty" anti heroes (think Hans Solo) is that they must have a "Save the Cat" moment (google it under Blake Snyder). In this instance, we don't get this until this bit:
I never brought anyone back here. Never had, never would. This was our home. And Marc had no right to do this to us.
From that inner thought we learn that Terry is not as insensistive as he likes to pretend he is. He has standards. He's also very aware of when he's crossing Marc's line and in a way fears the consequences of doing so.

This story also exemplifies the power of the first person narrative. This story would not have worked if we had seen things from either Marc's or Dan's point of view. The story I find most similar is Clare London's "Freeman", another excellent example of unreliable first person narrative.

If you read "Stray" and had some problems with one or other of the characters, re-read it (as I did in the end) and see all the clues that are scattered about regarding their real characters and judge them then through your eyes and not those of the viewpoint character.

View all my reviews
0 Comments

Redemption Reef an online m/m soap

1/22/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Our online m/m soap "Redemption Reef" the spin-off from Remmy Duchene's soap "Haven Falls" is being launched on Saturday 22nd January.

Dr Miles Sutherland, Aiden Parker, Lyle Ashley Tate and Carter (Gil) Gillespie have been told to meet at Lyle's place at 9pm. They don't know why they're being summoned as all they have in common is their friendship with Flynn Archer, the town's resident hothead and former bouncer.

Last we saw of Flynn, he was being airlifted to the nearest major hospital, unconscious and lucky to be alive after hitting his head on the edge of a shelf after a short but violent fight with the town's mortician, Henry Vale, who Flynn killed by stabbing him in the eye with a fountain pen.

Flynn had snuck into the mortuary in an attempt to free his lover, Aiden, from his prison in a hidden room in the basement where he'd been tortured. Vale was using him to get at Flynn whose parents he had already killed. It was the discovery of two severed hands belonging to Flynn's father that set the whole saga in motion.

The town's former assistant mortician, Stan Riley, had detached them from his corpse in an attempt to expose Vale's use of the mortuary to cremate his victims and dispose of the evidence by mixing their remains with others left for burial.

Stan himself became the latest to be disposed of in that way, and if it hadn't been for his planting of the hands and leaving cryptic clues in a diary that he hid inside a sealed frozen dinner package, Flynn might have been left to fight Vale alone.

However, Miles, an Aussie Doctor, and his work colleague the young British paramedic, Gil, had been in the park with Flynn when a scruffy dog unearthed the first hand. Seriously out of condition and overweight, Miles adopted the stray, in the hope that taking him for walks would help him get fit again. He called the dog, Roofie, sensing that instead of sleepless nights grieving for his late husband, Darren, he'd have no trouble falling asleep on the couch .

To complicate matters, Stan's replacement as assistant mortician, Lyle Ashley Tate, having run foul of the Italian mafia is himself in hiding under the watchful eye of the Agency.

It was only when Aiden's dog, Dante, turned up in the backyard of Miles' house that Miles and Gil realized that Aiden and Flynn were missing. Accompanied by the two dogs, they ended up at the funeral home just in time to save Flynn's life.

While all this drama was being played out, the men's personal lives have been a tangle of mixed emotions and hot encounters.

Needing more living space, Gil has only recently moved in to live with Miles as his own flat had been too small for the active and energetic young man. He had also become involved with Lyle, who is in the last stages of a sex change operation.

Miles is perplexed by his own attraction to Gil as he is still grieving Darren's tragic death from AIDS. Despite harboring unrequited strong feelings for Miles, Gil has also caught the eye of others in the town, especially the Sheriff, Lance Peabody.

Even though they haven't seen much of each other, the chemistry there had been hot and instantaneous. In fact no-one had seen the Sheriff for some time which was lucky for Gil as he already was finding it difficult juggling his feelings for both Lyle and Miles.

Written in joint live role-playing sessions, the soap is moving to a new location both on the web and in the story. It's envisaged that when the characters settle down, there will opportunities for guest authors to take turns bringing their own characters into the mix for a few episodes.

Who knows what is going to happen. The characters are certainly unsure of their future, and their writers aren't much better. All they know is that writing the saga of The Hands was so much fun that they didn't want it to end.

The current team of authors: Andrea Speed, Jessie Blackwood, JJ Levesque, Jen Swanson, Katisha Moreish and I are  posting our stories free on the web as thanks for all our current readers and those who might be inspired by our writing to check out our other books. From time to time we will suggest a different charity that readers, if they are so inclined, might like to donate money in recognition of our effort.

0 Comments

    A.B.Gayle

    This is a collection of reviews I've posted at Goodreads and
    interviews authors have granted me.

    Plus from time to time, I'll share my take on writing and marketing. This will be done under the Tyler Knoll banner, because nothing is better for curing the headache these things can be for us.

    Archives

    August 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    June 2010
    March 2010

    Categories

    All
    Alexis Hall
    Ash Penn
    Barry Lowe
    Bev Dentham
    Brad Vance
    Bryl Tyne
    Chainmale
    Chaos Magic
    Christopher Koehler
    C.H. Scarlett
    C.J. Cherryh
    Clare London
    Damon Suede
    Darla Sands
    Desert Run
    Dirk Vanden
    Don Bastien
    Don Schecter
    Drag Queen
    Duck
    Dusk
    Erotic Horizons
    Habu
    Hank Edwards
    Heidi Cullinan
    Heights Of Passion
    Hot Head
    Hourglass
    Interview
    Isolation
    Jane Davitt
    Jay Lygon
    Jeff Mann
    John Preston
    John Wiltshire
    Josh Lanyon
    J.P. Barnaby
    Julie Bozza
    K.A.Mitchell
    Keith Fennell
    Kim Dare
    Lisa Henry
    Lyn Gala
    Margie Church
    Marshall Thornton
    Mel Keegan
    Mimosa
    Morticia Knight
    Mr Benson
    Opinion
    Out Of The Box
    Patric Michael
    Phillip Mackenzie Jr
    Quotes
    Redemption Reef
    Reversal
    Review
    Reviews
    Robert Reynolds
    Robert Rodi
    Ryan Field
    Scott Terry
    Stray
    Syd Mcginley
    T.A. Webb
    Thom Lane
    Trey #3
    Tyler Knoll
    Vancouver Nights
    Wild Raspberries
    William Maltese
    Writing

    RSS Feed

    Follow this blog
Picture
The copyright to all the material published on this site is owned by A.B. Gayle.