Genre: YA Horror / Fantasy
Length: 125 pages
Self-published
My 9 Reader Hot-Button Considerations:
1. World's Immersion:
We take a seat at the table of J.Scott Sharp's role-playing game of imaginative youth. Awkward geek socialization finds safe haven in acceptance and juvenile hierarchy. This table of clattering dice and characterization, with inference to meaningful quests brought to mundane Life, becomes the preamble bubble about-to-burst.
Arizona is a blazing hot place, both in environment, as well as in the trials of tweens growing up in a harsh world. Parents can die on you early, cult predators can swoop in to prey on developing minds, and friends can hide intimate wounds one only notices when looking a little closer than expected.
Playing at being heroic shifts with the unraveling of a recurring dream that assaults Richie Lyons' senses, forcing the young protagonist to examine messages bombarding his brain beyond an imagination game. Heroism becomes the shouldering of psychic burdens alone, as in the silence of youth grappling with issues beyond maturing capability; finally, pain transforms into action, heading off one damning prophecy of fire...
2. Character/Icons:
Richie Lyons: A deep feeling boy has the burdens of Life thrown on to his shoulders, experiencing the death of his father at an early age. Highly sensitive, Richie can smell subtle emotions off of those around him...and discovers he can also 'see horrific outcomes' for those around him, that are beyond present reality.
Cecilia Barnes: A geek girl with the quiet demeanor, "Cece" plays her soft-spoken role around the boys, but don't be fooled. When push comes to shove, she reveals an unexpected pluck to her spirit, and surprise, ferocious loyalty.
Sid Hammer: He runs the dungeon game, and his mocking mouth, taking full advantage of being 'an old friend.' In fact, established history allows Sid to get away with pushing his friends around the gaming table. This trouble-maker slides off, despite Richie's warnings, to meet up with an awaiting, dangerous reality...
Guy Winchester: On the totem pole, Guy rounds out the bottom, with an easily suppressed character and submissive personality. Yet, there is more up the sleeve to Guy's shadowy nature. There is an unknown darkness behind his distancing glasses, that only Richie suspects...but won't speak of.
Geri Lyons: She tries really hard to be close, and it is not easy for her. Delvin's death left her a widow, with two shell-shocked children to bring up on her own. Maybe it is this deepest of wounds, that makes Richie hyper-aware of how deeply she loves him...and he is willing to defend her against anything.
Felicia Lyons: "Fel" is the younger sister, and she acts it...willfully not looking up to older Richie, yet loving him unfailingly in her own too-young-to-know-it way.
Pastor Trevous Free: Overly familiar, creepily suggestive, packing heat and a smile that threatens insidious connections, Pastor Free is an antagonist with powerful, potential mileage for the series.
Jacob: He is a street-wise thug with a rough-house mug. Jacob is Pastor Free's brutal fist, and has apparently waited a long time to give Richie a hard shot to the body...and put the boy's lights out.
3. Structural Appointments:
As a novella, this stream-lined story with the epic ramifications is properly built for a series. Longer books run the risk of getting bogged down or distracted by too many sub-plots. FIVE maintains its focus, only deviating from Richie's P.O.V. to step inside fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the sinister psychologies of Pastor Free and Jacob.
Interestingly, the very length of this novella would translate seamlessly into television or screenplay formatting.
4. "Visuality,"/Sensory Appeals:
"The waves of heat and fire, avian-like, fiery ash floated by...a carpet with diamond shapes. It was there and then consumed in flames in front of my face." J. Scott Sharp works us like a boxer measuring his range. Some shots are to the eyes, while other shots, an internalized flurry in passages like, "Warm blood rushed into my mouth, the taste of the coppery fluid ran down my throat. The taste repulsed me and the sound of the wrist bone crunching under the tension of my jaw made me close my eyes..."
It is the visceral nature of the author's writing, that transports this book beyond simply a Young Adult story. This telling, at times, almost hits with the reality of a Noir when encounters take on such a realistic feel. I like that this story does not get toned down, that horrific events carry the weight evoking a palpable, believable reality. A reality of high stakes.
Sharp believes in engaging the senses to affect Readers, and where possible, creeping inside our uncomfortable sensations, mental or physical. Or in perceptions of character and the character of perceptions..."Sometimes when emotions were intense, I could almost smell it on a person, like at the funeral, Mom had perfume on, but underneath it, she smelled like she had given up. Now, I could smell the emotion on Guy, a mixture of bitterness and sweat."
The cover itself, originally conceived by J.Scott Sharp, and produced in final design by paranormal romance author, Rebecca Hamilton, is a well-wrought image of Richie's fiery visions.
5. Thematic/Mythic Appeals:
The key compelling theme lacing up THE LIST OF FIVE is that of Dream Symbols, recurring in a gathering pattern of heart-breaking dread. A universal mystery is the nature of these revealing, surrealist pieces to our own psyches, the random role-playing, 'silent movies,' through people whom we've merely met or known intimately, each taking on roles delivering messages to our deep subconscious.
Richie's troubling, senses-drowning dream is a building mystery, whose pieces gather through the chapters, snapping in place a motion picture of mounting dread, and ultimate loss. What if...your most terrifying, recurring nightmare, were actually a strong psychic warning...or the flip of a blind-siding coin, not actually warning of future events...but the on-set of one's own inevitable madness?
Perhaps no people or events to touch our lives, are actually ever random, but flowing purposefully beneath the known, as Sharp suggests: "Dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask."
An undercurrent, recurring in Sharp's writing, is also that of abuse beneath the innocence of youth. In Sharp's emerging viewpoint, the world of children is rife with bruises and battlefields escaping revelation, until a closer examination of symbols and signs.
6. Story-Flow:
The novella plays on light feet, buoying pace on the expression of observation and character, and then disturbing events of past and present, to force character out of introversion. Internal to external exploration, transitions with a return to the haunting dream driving the action. Dramatically, Sharp understands balance, and how to draw Readers deeper in through the releasing and flexing of tensions.
This is a solid, quick story, that will leave Readers anxious for the asking, "What is going to happen next?"
7. Innovation/Genre-Blend:
I see this novella in terms of a split-personality behavior. Conceptualization here, walks dark edges into the Horror element...while playing with a heart merging into Fantasy, almost superhero milieu. We are reading about a young adult character who is revealed to have a curse or super power, depending on how you look at it, in his ability to dream of future events surrounding him.
THE LIST OF FIVE ventures into the terrain of YA books notably dealing with harsher themes or dark material. Almost hard-boiled in how some of the action plays out. What will be telling, is how the second book will play out, as to what side of this Horror/Fantasy pendulum, the books will swing toward...
8. Author's Voice/Language:
J. Scott Sharp is writing with a voice appropriate to express his tween/teen-aged protagonist. Richie Lyons is young in experience, his awareness of his own maturity, what first love behaves like, and how serious matters rapidly mature this viewpoint through the story's telling.
This voice takes the time to meditate on the nature of love, of peers, of parents, through the coloring of early loss in life. In Sharp's world, even the young have already lost, and mature quickly out of necessity. The telling of the tale, feels as though innocence is being clung to with slipping fingers, expressed in bittersweet passing. The world-weary maturity of the author flexes to step inside Richie's rite-of-passage by fire.
9. The After Resonance:
What I admire about THE LIST OF FIVE is that although written in the experience-range of YA, brutally observed scenes are thrown down as in a gauntlet challenge. The events are hard-boiled: mental and physical abuse, betrayal, cult manipulation, street-fighting, insanity, murder or death, plus threat of mass destruction. Not soft material.
What strikes me after reading the author's book, is that Sharp has written an 'origin story,' setting up through these ghastly events of childhood, the lonely road of a wandering anti-hero in Richie Lyons. When Readers see where Richie is left, at the very last, startling turn-of-a-chapter, it becomes apparent we are only launching off from the beginning...and maybe, out of Young Adult into New Adult themed challenges.
I say 'anti-hero,' because although finishing this first book in the series, I still can't say if Richie is somebody we hope to save from his own nightmarish journey...or maybe, burn him at the stake in case he's here to bring fire to our world. Or maybe...Lyons is here to put out the coming fire of possible end-times. Who can yet say how J. Scott Sharp's inferno of premonitions will turn out for Richie Lyons, or for Readers?
No comments:
Post a Comment