Perceptions of Prose

I just read Victoria Hoyle's review of Laird Barron's collection on Strange Horizons. One particular analysis of a passage struck me as interesting, and I'm reproducing my comment on the review here. What I really appreciated was Hoyt actually picking out examples and using them to justify her reaction to the collection. If I disagree, it might just be that I'm a better "ideal reader" for Barron than Hoyt, which sometimes happens when you are assigned, as in this case, a slate of award nominees and have to comment on each one. On the other hand, she makes a good point that Barron's audience may be primarily male--I dunno, that's more for other female readers to say, not me.I think what you really meant to say is: "I am not the ideal reader for Laird Barron." On the passage you quote, I appreciated the analysis but believe you could come to different conclusions.Just to play devil's advocate, let's look at the passage again:"His relentless eyes adjusted by rapid degrees, fastening on a mass of sea-green tarpaulin gone velvet in the subterranean illume. This sequestered mass reared above the exposed gulf of loft, nearly brushing the venerable center-beam, unexpressive in its context, though immense and bounded by that gravid force to founding dirt.""Relentless eyes" scanned to me as a "restless gaze" combined with the idea of what he's seeing is intense, thus "relentless" because he cannot not see it; hyperbolic, perhaps, but acceptable in context. As for "illume," you can't actually divorce it from "subterranean", as in "subterranean lighting". Which makes perfect sense. "Sequestered" means more or less "separate" in this case, but is a more sinister word and scans better in the sentence, in terms of the rhythm.As for a center beam being "unexpressive in its context," I read this as very expressive on Laird's part, ironically enough. If you've ever seen a center beam, a really nice wooden center beam emanates a calm quality, a kind of unexpressiveness--especially, I would imagine in the context of the weird stuff around it.As for the rest of it, "gravid force" might be a stretch, but it did to me mean quite plausibly "pregnant," as in bulging downward. "Founding dirt" seems self-explanatory.In any event, this passage *reads aloud* with a very nice rhythm. I would also say that in the context of certain kinds of stories, you're going to get prose that *seems* more purple on first glance, or non-functional, but that when you take the time to examine it, does in fact have a function.In this case, Barron's approach gets across the strangeness of the situation in a way that "There was a green mass hanging in the half-darkness next to the center-beam" simply could not accomplish.