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!

Yowza, have I got a spooky one for you today. I initiallygrabbed Linwood Barclay’s Whistle because of the train. Turns out this is no ordinary train—it’s a toy train. FROM HELL. Dunh dunh DUUUUNH!

Goofy dramatics aside, Barclay does marvelous work in hisprologue when it comes to setting up the gift of this train set to a young boy over twenty years ago. The boy had wanted a video game console, but the father brought in a train set his coworker was getting rid of, thinking about the toys he loved when he was a kid. There’s a great little family dynamic here with the jerk of a big sister and the confused mom. Thank goodness for that confused mom, for it’s the interaction of the parents that drops the serious foreshadowing of tragedy and death that occurred not far away—in fact, the father’s coworker came from that very place, a place where his wife had somehow been electrocuted. But hey, a toy electric train! And I hated to end when the train caught Jeremy.

There is no other way to describe it. The boy went from upset and dismissive to obsessed in two pages. Barclay’s pacing here is spot-on, and I couldn’t help but peek ahead that the jerk of a big sister will need an ambulance as the train chuffs on…

So I know how I’m starting my summer reading. 😊

And what will we discover in the following story's pages? We'll have to wait and see. xxxx

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