“Baby, why you all wet?

This story is almost tailored to me as a tabletop role-play game designer. If you’ve read it, you’ll know why. In the indie scene there has been many articles written about players (unintentionally) using role-play as a sort of therapy. It’s a safe space with psychic distance, and some games intentionally create a lot of player bleed, where people pour a themselves into their characters. But that’s not what role-play is equipped for. Not in the least.

This makes this particular story even more fascinating to me. I’ve seen what role-play can do, as well as it’s limits. So the desperate bid to bring Andrew to himself by playing out his fantasy is very compelling to me. Perhaps making it even easier for me to suspend my disbelief. The ending especially made sense to me. It’s funny, because I think the story otherwise would have felt pretty contrived.

What helps, of course, is getting along very well with the prose. The voice here is gripping, interesting, and insistent. And it’s far better than the movie at inserting plausible deniability. I first saw the movie and my date was particularly annoyed when I guessed what was happening in the first five minutes. But that’s because he literally spells it out for you right away. It was still a fun movie to watch, but I would have preferred by far some more deftness with the foreshadowing. The book is that. Before it tips the hat there is a bit of background on the character and some additional context. It’s still there, but it’s far better. What’s more, foreshadowing like that makes sense and is far more satisfying in a book rather than in a movie, in my opinion.

“Teddy gave him nothing.”