CRABS

By Jerome Preisler

Thirty years after the event, the now middle-aged narrator finally comes clean on what happened the day his girlfriend Janet died.

These days Jerome Preisler is quite a well-renowned author – perhaps having enjoyed most success with his Tom Clancy’s Power Plays series. But back in 1988 I am guessing he was a bit of a rookie at his trade and still attempting to find his literary legs and, hence, still experimenting with genres.

For this one feels like an early attempt of someone trying to write a James Herbert – but failing; Janet, in particular, is a rather poorly painted figure. The opening scene-setting paragraphs read like one long whiny self-pitying moan, and before long the reader is floundering in such verbosity as:

“I hadn’t been entirely successful in shaking a recurrent sense of despair-tinged anxiety that gnawed at the thin, frayed outer edges of my complacence like some needle-toothed monster that creeps on silent padded paws and attacks only the sleeping.”

There are a scattering of mixed metaphors (plants/candles) in the text, and animal similes abound as elephants, beavers, iguanas, seals, ants, crickets and fireflies are dragged in by Preisler to help to make his points.

And yet despite all of this, Crabs somehow works. The beach scene is a real page-turner with some of the imagery delightfully disturbing; the crab mounting Janet scene particularly so.

The real puzzle though is why the narrator chose to lie to the police afterwards, and blame the attack upon a shark? Unless, of course, he did the lady in himself and the whole yarn was naught but a great big fib.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5604163&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5307129",#48148964)