Something shocking my students told me. A review of Vile Affections

Here's what my students told me that was shocking. Several of them said they skip long paragraphs, skip descriptions, and go straight to the dialogue. And these were creative writing students! We writers work long and hard to craft the descriptions and some readers skip over it. Talk about a horror story!

Last summer I watched a webinar where four fantasy authors talked about how they write fight scenes. One said she was a ballet dancer and choreographed her fight scenes. Another said she watched Youtube fight scenes and copied them. One said she never wrote fight scenes because her readers said they skipped them. What! So she said she just wrote, "They fought," and was done with it.

I recently read Vile Affections, thanks to Netgalley. It has pages and pages with no white space. The language was artistic and the stories were about (duh) vile and dangerous relationships, but I fear some readers would skip the flood of descriptions. You're not that kind of reader though, right. Right? If so, the review of Vile Affections follows.  Lots of vampires in it.  Nice cover, too. The book, not the review.

 Vile Affections has some of the most beautiful language I've read in a long time. Whether objects or scenery is vile or lovely, the descriptions are detailed and vivid.

When I first opened the book and saw that there were pages and pages of prose with no break, no white space, I thought reading it might be a slog. I was wrong though.  The stories, even with the large amount of description, were interesting and reasonably quick to read. 

Many of the stories had the same type of subject: dreams, a person telling a story to another, the fear of drowning, water, water, and more water in most, but they didn't seem to repeat themselves.

If you're a reader who skips long paragraphs this might not be for you. If you love gorgeous language you'll find much to enjoy in Vile Affections.