John J. Walsh IV

Reviews

I read your book today. I have to admit, for the first few pages I was a little worried. I thought your prose was overwrought and your dialogue unnatural and arch. After all of the work you put into it, I was afraid to have to tell you what I thought of it.

Then I realized, it’s not you. It’s me.

You don’t write like I do. You don’t hammer words together to satisfy the textbook mechanics of storytelling while sometimes managing to be clever. You use a lyrical kind of prose so baroque that it becomes poetry. This is not a collection of stories. This is a painting of the sea rendered in words. You don’t write like an author. You write like an artist.

Once I stopped trying to shoehorn your artwork into my template the whole thing became strikingly beautiful in its execution. The characters and the stories don’t stack up like bricks into a wall of story. They flow together like trickles of rainwater pouring through tendrils of fog, emerging and mixing and falling away into a sort of lucid dream that lets you know secrets as you need to know them. You’ve managed to deftly paint beauty through the Captain’s longing and horror through the old man’s fear—opposite ends of the spectrum rendered with equal skill and passion.

You have done a wonderful thing here, John Walsh. This is going to be a fantastic book. I’ve already read it twice.

You should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you.

—Marcus Alexander Hart, author of The Oblivion Society and Caster’s Blog