The Fifty Year Sword
Ratings9
Average rating3.2
"The nationally best-selling author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions has crafted a powerfully chilling novella--a ghost story for grownup readers. Late one evening at a party at an East Texas ranch house, five orphans gather to hear a story about a quest for a terrible weapon. Before them lies a long black box with five latches. As the owner of the box settles into a curious tale of revenge, the children grow more and more captivated, even as we grow more and more afraid that a new crime may await them all, especially as clocks in Upshur County approach midnight"--
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Other than the obvious attempt to cash in on the success of House of Leaves, why is this confusing, poorly narrated, mess of squiggly lines even its own book? Boo! I say. Boo!!!
As an OG who read HOL years ago and still have not received my t shirt that says “I survived House of Leaves”, I picked up the Fifty Year Sword with zero intention of reading it. I was drawn to the holes in the cover. Flipping through, I saw how short it was and thought: how bad could it be?
Other reviewers have done a great job of listing what is different about this story, so I wont get into it. Personally, I thought the book jacket copy was way cooler than the story itself. A sword that kills ideas! Awesome! Too bad it's not really in the book.
And how did it go from being Moze's Halloween party to whatsherface's birthday party? Nevermind, I don't care.
I can kiss a half an hour of my life away and I like the idea behind this book. Can I recommend it? No. But my hat is off to Danielewski for trying to do something different.
I do see a correlation between one star reviews from people who bought it, and two star reviews from people (like me) who borrowed it.
If you want to give it a try, I highly recommend borrowing it.
I found this to be very well written in many places, but ultimately confusing with the style of shifting between narrators mid-sentence, and the relevance of the narration-style to the story was mostly lost on me. I feel that I may want to revisit this book at a later date and really spend some time with it, perhaps using the color-coding to determine the speaker. The word-of-mouth, gossip, shared country wisdom element was well presented theoretically, but I feel that the words didn't fall together in a way that conveyed Danielewski's intention very clearly.
