Friday, April 23, 2010

Cat Week: Sinead: Back to the Start


A Collaboration LitZine
salingpusa.com

The idea here isn’t a new one, one person starts a story then others continue it. However, as with most projects like this the result is incredibly uneven, with wide variations in quality and style, before it careens wildly out of control into nonsense.

The first two chapters involve characters who are broken, and I’m not at all interested in reading about a guy who repeatedly stalks girls (or the girl being stalked for that matter). Apparently the person writing the third chapter thought along similar lines as their piece ignores what had gone on before hand and instead features a house infested with cats. Now I do wonder if hundreds (!!!) of cats would even want to live together in an abandoned house, even if they were plotting to take over a town.

One of the later chapters doesn’t even try to tie in to what had gone on beforehand, and I sort of wondered if the person who wrote that chapter really understood what the whole project was about. However, by that point the story had degenerated into something rather lacking in a coherent plot and the remaining chapters degenerate even further.

I did like the idea that each chapter would be told from the point of view of a different person, but without a central idea to keep everyone on the same page, the result is inconsistent.

Also, staple your damn zines. I had to staple this myself to stop it falling apart while reading.

1 comment:

  1. seriously! How hard is it to staple your zine, especially if it's only quarter-sized and you can use a regular stapler? NOT HARD AT ALL! I don't see why people don't staple their zines, or don't staple them through the fold but like a quarter inch in from the fold, through the front AND back halves of the zine, rendering it not only impossible to read but also cutting off loads of text. FJALSKJDLASJASLJWQIUEWOQUFFL. Pet peeves, I haz dem.

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