Welcome back, my fellow creatives!

Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience!

It's not often I see fake-outs in a book, but be damned if McAuley doesn't pull it off MULTIPLE TIMES in just half a dozen pages.The first line packs a punch: "Dragging a body through six inches of snow is even harder than I expected." A reader can make plenty of assumptions based on the first line, let alone the first page. We first meet the narrator the dead body of someone named Ben through the snow. At first, I thought she was dragging him to bury him in the wilderness, but then on the second page we learn she wants to get his body back to his family because he deserves a proper funeral...though what happened to him, we don't know, only that his chest is full of puncture wounds. But by the fourth page, Ben's body disappears to be replaced by a ghost addressing Hannah. And then Hannah wakes with Ben alive by her side. And then cold starts setting in with Ben interrogating her about his death. And then he vanishes, and Hannah is alone.McAuley deftly balances the immediate action of each page, whether it's hauling a carcass in the snow or a loving embrace with one's partner. The focus is on the moment, and because of that, readers are immediately digging for clues about what happened with Ben on the mountain and why they were there to begin with. Of course, one needn't give away the mystery so quickly, but it's fascinating for a ghost/dream version of the dead to ask the narrator what happened and she doesn't answer. Is she hiding it from ghost, or merely her own conscience? She's certainly doing a damn good job hiding it from the readers! So I guess I'd better keep reading to find out what happened. :)

Let’s see what next month’s find will teach us, shall we?

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!