Taylor Seibert’s story “Love Thy
Enemy” is about a young woman that gets abducted in the middle of the night and
taken to a remote cabin where she is calmly and very disturbingly tormented for
weeks. The writing was as good as it gets in this class and what I think
everyone expected from Seibert. Her control of scene and setting and
eye-popping descriptions and details drove the story almost flawlessly through
to the end.
Something I learned from the story
was a great way to pass the time. On page five Isabel lays down next to the
fire; in the following paragraph she is still laying next to the fire but
eighteen days have passed. The connection of the same image made the eighteen
days a smooth and easy transition and was something that I’ve never thought about
as an idea to pass time, especially monotonous time.
The only problem I had with the
story was the plot, it worked in a structural sense, but I tried and I just
couldn’t believe it. The only action that wasn’t completely robotic was the
light punch when Isabel was first going in to the house. But almost three weeks
of being pantsless in a one-room cabin in the woods didn’t lead to anything
else? How was nothing else concerning or going on in Isabel’s head?
Too much emphasis was put on the
message and not enough on the story. For a message to be successful, the story
must stand alone without it. The greatest fables and parables are first
stories; no matter the absurdity of the stories, they always have a fullness in
plot and detail which makes the message believable and relatable.
Not enough can be said about the
craft of the story, it felt natural coming off the page which is a good indication
that it very naturally went onto the page. And it was very extremely and
totally successful at making me feel quite uncomfortable. I checked over my
shoulder multiple times.
No comments:
Post a Comment