Hello, hello! Today’s the first day of October and you know what that means: time to start on ‘A Night in the Lonesome October’. And so we have the first chapter… and the prologue which I forgot about.
So to start off, we have the prologue. And I must say, the prologue is a truly excellent introduction to the story. Especially since it’s only a solid two pages in total. Yet it manages to tell a reader just about everything they need to know. By the end, you know Snuff is the protagonist mostly as a supporting role to Jack. You learn Snuff is a dog and come to understand the perspective the story is written in will be slightly different from usual. But you also come to understand that he isn’t just a dog; both in the sense that he’s large and threatening enough to intimidate a ‘professional’ guard dog and the knowledge that he wasn’t always a dog. Through incidental narration, you’re also told a fair amount about Jack since you know he has both a knife and wand that are important, the latter particularly since it tells you the plot will be involved with the mystical and the occult. You learn the setting is London, though admittedly time period is still a bit vague. And perhaps most critically, the mention of other people performing the same kind of graverobbings tells you this isn’t isolated to just Jack’s goals; there is something more going on that involves more than one group arrayed against each other. All in all: short, sweet, and sets the stage with an incredible economy of words.
Then on he other hand we have Night 1 which serves as another example of excellent economy of words, albeit in a slower, subtler sense. It’s also about two pages — I think even a little shorter than the prologue — but it doesn’t tell you quite as much. Rather, it serves to show you a good deal about who Snuff is as a person. Or dog as the case may be. It’s a snippet of his routine, establishes a familiar touchstone for something that he will be doing over the rest of the story whether it’s mentioned or not. But it also shows off his reliability and experience. We don’t know what the Things really are, but they’re described enough for a reader to know they aren’t anything from this world. They’re smart enough to talk, uncanny enough to shapeshift, and mystical enough that they can be contained in the likes of (implicitly) magic circles and mirrors. Then, to contrast this, we have Snuff. He responds to these monsters in a very mundane manner, by either intimidating them into submission — which again reaffirms his relative strength since the Things are afraid of him and he’s confident he can handle them as long as it’s not all at once — or brushing their threats and temptations aside like it’s idle conversation. Which shows he’s an old hand. These kind of monsters are everyday to him. He’s seen similar things before, probably fought similar things before given his confidence, and they simply don’t scare him. He goes through his routine and makes sure everything is where it should be because that’s his job. He’s a watchdog and he watches.
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