Yes, it was written in the first person from the same character throughout, and I had considered that it could be taken as an intended quirk or personality trait of the character, but it was used so much it got really annoying.
It’s like a bit of writing advice I heard or read somewhere— new writers sometimes try to get creative with their dialog, and instead of using the word “said” after a line of dialog, they say “…he uttered” or “…she exclaimed”. The advice was that even though that’s not wrong grammatically, it tends to take the reader out of the story flow, so just use “said”, which is more or less invisible to the reader.
I do know the exact meaning of the word, but it seems like Koontz would use it in a general sense of “darkly evil” or “sinister”. Even if he used it in its literal sense, he definitely did overuse it.
I note his repeated use of ‘congeries’.
Almost nobody else ever uses that word, unless they are describing a Lovecraftian horror, especially one that looks like bubble-wrap.
I am bothered by overuse of trendy words or phrases. I recall a few years ago that the word “judder” seemed to be everywhere overnight. People started bum-rushing the bandwagon in 2002, and in 2013 we reached peak judder. Presumably the cool kids have found some other literary flourish to overuse.
I was so grateful to get Donaldson’s works on my Kindle, so I could just touch the word to get the definition. Reading his stuff was an exercise in expanding my vocabulary, albeit enjoyable.
I was going to mention Lovecraft, but for “cyclopean”. Also Anne Rice for “preternatural” and Neal Asher for “blow-by” (as in, describing a combat robot as looking like the blow-by of a horseshoe crab and a scorpion, for (not a real) example).
It’s really annoying when an author makes up a word, then flogs it to death. Yes, Neal Stephenson and your overuse of the word “phant’sy” in The Baroque Cycle, I’m looking at you.
This year I read a number of books by Chris Bohjalian (highly recommended!). At some point, I realized that in EVERY book he used the word “myriad” at least once. Once I noticed it, I started looking of fit in subsequent books, and when it came, it was like, “Aha!”
Vonnegut only used “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse 5 when someone died. If you just saw it as a phrase, you missed something critical. The book is about death, specifically about how capricious death is in the moment yet comes to everyone eventually. Edited to link to a wonderful essay by Salman Rushdie on the book and Vonnegut.
There are no Tom Swifties in the Tom Swift books. The author of the original early 20th century series, Howard Garis, used adverbs frequently, and people noticed them. This was a hallmark of hack writing, so much so that writers like Hemingway and Stephen King called for striking out all adverbs, which is just silly. But Garis never seemed to used the particular kind of self-referential adverb that is the point of the Tom Swifty. Those are much later jokes parodying the style, spread by a 1963 book of that title.
Dickens did one, though, in Our Mutual Friend.
“You find it Very Large?” said Mr. Podsnap, spaciously.
I got that. But I thought he used it in Breakfast of Champions as well. Apparently, the phrase there was “and so on”. It’s been 30 years since I read a Vonnegut novel.
Harry Turtledove’s “Crosstime Traffic” books often have the characters lamenting the lack of some kind of hygiene device - fartasta? farsata? (Sorry, I don’t have one of the books at hand.)
As Rushdie writes, lots of people read Slaughterhouse-Five (not 5: have to nitpick myself) when they’re young and miss the context of the repetition. He did, I did. I bet most people do. The book requires rereading.
Yes, repetition to make a point is a valid literary device. I guess this thread is more about the unintended repetitions or misuse. Even if it’s fully intentional, it can be overdone to the point that it gets annoying and takes a reader out of the story flow. So I guess this thread is about that, as well. But it is important to keep in mind that repetition to make a point is a valid literary device.
