A Mad Dash (or, N or M?)

Blogger Michael Dennis recently shared some thoughts about The Face in the Frost, both of the book itself and the way it was published.

First, of course, the book:

Strangely, this fantasy isn’t the typical sword and sorcery of its time.  The fantasy world falls somewhere between a purely invented one and our own.  A magic mirror projects views of the future (or perhaps another world) with cars, major league sports teams, and real-world places.  It reminded me a bit of the musings of T.H. White’s Merlin in The Once and Future King who lived backwards in time.

There are a few droll one-liners and turns of phrase, but I found the book difficult to read because of the longer-than-I’m-used-to paragraphs and descriptions.  There were also a number of visions and dreams interspersed into the plot.

The book was also a bit more supernatural horror, or perhaps psychological suspense, than fantasy.  In this respect it reminded me of the tone in Joseph Delaney’s The Last Apprentice Series (The Revenge of the Witch is the first book).

His comments about the how the book was published are more about how the text appears as an e-book:

One issue I had with the text itself was due to its conversion to an e-book. In the Kindle edition, the em dash used to separate parenthetical phrases is displayed in the text as a hyphen. Unfortunately, Bellairs uses this construction extensively through the novel, so this was a major distraction. As an example, the phrase

the British man-of-war Actaeon, which ran — will run — aground on a sand bar during the siege of Charleston in 1776

was encoded like

the British man-of-war Actaeon, which ran-will run-aground on a sand bar during the siege of Charleston in 1776

I have to wonder if this is something ebook publishers see a lot of and, more importantly, if they bother to correct it.