I ran into an author/film maker named Peter Christian Hall on Facebook. He has a blovel, readable by anyone with the time and patience to do it. It’s called “American Fever.”
It’s not a cliff-hanger by any means, so I can tell you that it’s about a pandemic. It has many plot appropriate links to masks and the like, and is lavishly illustrated.
It is the blogger’s voice alone that we experience. The character writes employing casual blogger vocabulary, but periodically he lets fly with a bit of arresting description. This happens not infrequently when speaking of his love interest of the moment. He is serially monogamous.
“The woman who greeted me at the door was memorable. She was younger, dark-haired, clad in a minimal lace bra. She sustained a pair of his boxers with willpower and cheek. A huge ink angel adorned her naked back, tattooed wing tips dipping to a place I tried not to stare at.”
It is a deliberately claustrophobic book. The reader is stalked by the plot and battered by the blog format, distracted by the many hyperlinks, and given very few of the usual bread crumbs that stories often employ to keep one “turning pages,” or clicking away. My reading strategy was to barrel through it. A better method might be to read a single post a day, and in that way, it would be like the TV show “24” in a sort of inversion. You’d live it along with its purported time frame, a bit shy of a year. If that’s the way you do it, you’ll have more time to click on some of the links. You’ll be an expert on viruses, masks, drugs, home remedies, things to definitely not do, things that may or may not help, and places to go to avoid the authorities. You’ll also probably discover some new music.
It is a stylistically pure blovel. It has a uniform texture throughout. The piece is deliberately, as the inviolable province of the author, the conscious decision of the creator, nearly devoid of dialogue. There is nevertheless an alternation between telling and showing. When one writes a weblog, one describes the day to day in all of its matter of fact. The matters of fact in this novel are the nitty-gritty facts of the pandemic. It has the intended effect: one feels the closed-in, paranoiac, suffocating reality of it. The women are beautifully and lovingly portrayed, and the love and respect for them is manifest. The government, regarded with deep suspicion, is another very well-developed theme. I suppose my problem is with the lack of mercy for the reader. The expression of confined horror is achieved by confining the reader with the horror of reading relentless blow-by-blow blog posts. In that respect, it’s a tour de force.
Wishing Peter all the luck in the world with this piece, and all future endeavors.