Fiction. Again.

I stand by the fact that fiction is a platform of the imagination. Every concept and thought, every idea and expression can be found within. It is the ability to make such inexpiable and emotional things into text that makes it so challenging, yet it has the ability to be anything. Unfortunately, the ability to be anything is a double-edged sword with a barbed and spiked handle. There is bad fiction and good fiction (in a sense of grammar and pace), there is fiction that can make you laugh till you are gasping for air and fiction that can shatter your heart to pieces, and some times you have the fiction you love and hate at the same time; A catch-22. Oates' Blackened Eye is a good example.

Oates is undoubtedly a good writer and knows the English language, but the unique lens we get to use as a reader is unique from the general format of books. Fiction stories are complex and most authors will make it a mix of first-person and narration followed in a relatively chronological format, Oates follows a reflective form, as if reading a journal entree, to tell the story. The tone used to make it reflective, the word choice and parentheses (and parenthesis) that all come together and help make the story feel unstintingly finite, and with the story topic being abduction, rape, and abuse it can make the reader very tense.

I find the story to be a perfect example of an I-Love-It-I-Hate-It story. The way it is written is fantastic, the character is developed and personified, the plot is described as the character would/would be able to describe it, and uses the same World-Laws to keep it seemingly real. Yet the topic is dark and troubling, a reader can easily feel their gut twist with what is written and can forget what text is in front of them is fiction.

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."-Stephen Fry