Name: Colton Ray's review of The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski
Item: The Familiar
Rating: 1
Author: Colton Ray

Mark Z. Danielewski

One rainy day in may

The Familiar

Colton Ray

Short summary: Nothing happens, and slowly.

This book is about the closest thing to unreadable that I've picked up. Everything from the style to the font to the characters are postured in a way to make it seem super intellectual, and it just fails on a fundamental level. 

This book is not about the story or the characters or even a plot. It's about how many different ways the author can arrange words on a page. Never mind a coherent story line or characters that seem human in any way. 

It wasn't only the fonts that were unreadable. The writing was actually really, really terrible. Dialogue was somehow both wooden and computer-like, the characters were interchangeable and robotic and did things that made no sense, and when Danielewski tried to write Asian and Mexican characters, it really made me cringe. It is a shame, since the summary had potential, and I will admit, the format of some pages did look cool. But that's not why I read books, and that's not what books are about.

I think experimental fiction, when done well, is really interesting. This is not done well. It's empty, pretentious, and extremely pointless. Style over substance. Would not recommend.

Jason Porterfield

More like 3.5, but whatever. Some of the storylines are more compelling than others, MZD pulls out all the stops when it comes to presenting each point of view. No one else can make a book look like a character's thought process quite like Danielewski.

Jos &
The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski

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The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski