Johnny Cash Beset By Darkness

A Short Story By John Marshall Daniel
Reviewed by Max A. Gordon

Setting: A carnival
Protagonist: The Beastman (Gordon)
Narrator: first person - Gordon
Tense: present

Speaking about oneself in the third person speaks volumes about a lack of involvement in one’s own life. Speaking about oneself as a fictional creation, in the third person, even more eloquently speaks to dissociation. Such is the case with The Beastman, a character both cynical and lost until rescued by the past.

The tone adopted by this first person narrator serves to move the carnival setting from the ‘exotic’ into the mundane, thereby enhancing the reader’s insight into the characters and elevating the theme of redemption.

Told in the present tense, with little explicit back-story, the past is clear and the future invites optimism without being overtly promising.

With only minor copy editing oversights (subject-verb agreement, unintended tense change, formatting) this ~4000 word story is certainly worth a read. Well done – the inkwell is four-fifths full!

ePublisher: storySouth A “Best Of” Issue Celebrating Seven Years Of Online Publishing. storySouth is published three times a year, and hopes to showcase the best new talent arising out of the south.

Format: I read online using a browser, and was untroubled by advertising at the website.