Dragaera

Agyar (Agyar?/Sixth Sense Spoilers) (Was Re: Brokedown Palace)

Mon May 15 18:53:53 PDT 2006

Howard Brazee wrote:
> Scott Schultz wrote:
>
>> It's easy to get into the mind-set that everyone here has read all of 
>> SKZ's
>> books. Not true, though. For instance, I've never read Agyar, though 
>> I've
>> been familiar with "the twist" for quite a long time now thanks to 
>> spoilers
>> on the list. I'm not resentful of it, mind, but I can say that 
>> knowing it
>> ahead of time has probably contributed to my having not bothered to 
>> pick up
>> the book.
>>
>> I'd say that any time there's a chance of something being a spoiler, 
>> that
>> the safe thing to do is to assume that it is.
>>  
>>
> I don't see that it's a spoiler, at least not the kind that we read 
> the whole book to discover.

In this case, It just never seemed like a mystery to me. It's kind of 
along the same lines as the movie /The Sixth Sense/. When I saw that 
film, it was fairly apparent to me after the first scene (where Bruce 
Willis' character is shot) that he probably died right there...And for 
the rest of the movie I was watching carefully for some proof that this 
wasn't the case.. Which, of course, doesn't come, since he's actually a 
ghost for the rest of the film.

It surprised me later that other people had apparently not caught on to 
this until the very end of the movie.

"But we saw him die in the opening scene!"
"Yeah, but I thought he just got better somehow."

Sheesh.

It was the same way with /Agyar/. In the first chapter, he meets a 
lovely young girl (Jill) who's flirting with someone else, does some 
kind of psychic trickery and goes home with her and does... things. 
Obviously things are not being completely revealed, but by the end of 
two or three chapters, it should be pretty obvious what's going on...

Did Steve really intend for the reader not to catch on to what he was 
doing until the very end? And if something is revealed during the 
exposition of the book, before the narrative hook, does it really count 
as a "spoiler"?

Not that Steve's narrative hooks are always easy to spot.

Majikjon