Blood Man was just a random book I got from Amazon. I didn’t expect much when started reading this $0.99 book. But I soon found that it was one of the best novels I’ve ever read.
You can easily tell a good writer from a bad one from the language. True that novels are not poem, but from the language itself you can at least tell how much effort a writer has put into his book. True that the writing styles are different, but a heavy plotted story with not much care of details usually turns out to be addicting drug with little nutrition. And language is not just about how beautiful the words are, though for a long time I thought it was. Instead, it is how good to convey the point, the scene, and the feeling that defines how good the language is.
Paul Cleave surely has good writing skills. I find his voice easy to follow. Yes, voice is an important requirement. It is not about how big your vocabulary is. You write novels to be read. If readers can’t follow what you are talking about, they lose interests. But there is also something beyond reader friendly. You need to convey the idea, the scene, the story effectively. You’ve got to put readers right into the scene. The only way you can achieve that is to put into vivid details. This is where all the skills about dialog and description fits in. Use comparison to convey the feeling readers are familiar with. Use all five senses instead of just one to describe the scene. Believability lies on the details.
I open up the curtains and sunlight pours into the living room and the kitchen, bouncing off every metal surface and making the sun appear to be about as far away as my next-door neighbor. The poplar trees lining the street have been defeated by the heat, the burned leaves drooping, front lawns turning crispy brown as the sun beats down on it all. The air-conditioning is working overtime, separating the outside world from the inside by a dozen degrees. Sam’s holidays kick in in about seven hours and her excitement levels are high and my stress levels are high and Jodie has high levels of both. I’m pretty sure the house has a poltergeist living in it; it comes through at night and does its best to make sure there are no straight lines anywhere.
Above is a paragraph from the Chapter One of the book, nicely describes a peaceful morning before the storm.
You will notice how easily you follow the scene without fancy words or complicated grammer. You will find that the details are not random. They are in the order of how the protagonist feels the world. And he feels what matter to him.
(The following part will show part of the story. Don’t read it if you don’t want the detail spoiled. )
The Point of View of Blood Men is very special. It is a combination of first person PoV of the protagonist, Edward Hunter, and the third person PoV of the second protagonist, Detective Inspector Carl Schroder. Two PoV, two lines of stories. Paul Cleave managed to make it not confusing by seperating them into different chapters. You know you are reading from Edward’s perspective when you see “I”. And you know you are reading from a different angle when you see Edward being refered to as Hunter.
But why go through the troubles of combining two so different PoV instead of just use a multi-person PoV just like all the other writers usually do? I soon find the answer to this question when reading the story. The first person PoV is more personal. It makes the readers to see from the protagonist’s perspective. And to understand Hunter and the development of his story, one has to put himself into his shoes.
Edward Hunter was a man living a normal man’s life despite his father being a serial killer. He heard voices and took extraordinary actions after his wife was killed. One would regard him as mad and dangerous if seeing his action from the third person point of view. Yet Edward was just like all of us. And that is the idea hardest to convey in this story. To show a husband and father who acts out of love instead of madness, a third person point of view will never work as well.
But first person PoV is limited. It can’t tell the full story. Paul Cleave needed someone to fill in the gap. Thus came Schroder and his third person PoV. And the fact that the story is told from too totally different types of PoV actually helps the readers to follow. In a usual third person multi-point of view, readers may find it hard to tell which angle they are looking from. Readers won’t be confused when they can easily get the hint from the “I” and “He”. A more fancy way will be putting the story into the forms of diary, memoirs and reports. Agatha Christie and Steven King had used this method. But I find it not necessary. It is only the PoV that really matters.
I took a thrill when Paul Cleave wrote into Edward Hunter’s psychology. It is not because of how mad it is, but how real. When Edward Hunter tried to remember the details of the robbery and find people to blame, he saw the security guy coorperated with the robbers. He couldn’t tell his imagination from his memory. And I find that sometimes the same thing happens to me. It is nothing as mad. It is just that sometimes I have a dream of recent events and when I try to remember the events I can’t be sure if that was what really happened or just happened in the dream. What is reality, when we only have memory to rely on, and when memory can be planted? Edward was just a little bit more unfortunite than us. He has the paranoid schrizophrenia from his genere. It is harder for him to tell a imagination than we tell a dream. And that’s what novel is. It is from the real life, just a little bit more dramatic.
Blood Men doesn’t just rely on the death to thrill the readers. In fact, it was not the death that thrilled me. The greatest shock came when Edward successfully rescued his daughter and spent time with her, and when the police came up and seperated him from his daughter, it turned out that his daughter was already dead long ago. He spent time with the body. I could tell there was something weird when Paul Cleave described the daughter (no dialog, too quiet). But my premonition just helped setup the shock when the truth came. That was a real master piece of susprise. I felt the love, the sadness and the regret of the protagonist all at the same time, staring at the page frozen.
Last but not least, the present tense is really good at telling this story. It gives the sense of current, as if all the events are happening right now, right in front of the readers’ eyes. Paul Cleave knows what he is doing.
