been repeating first rate town by good kid lately, it’s so good 🥹🥹🥹

Not me bringing up fanfics being traditionally published again 🫠 But okay this isn’t exactly that.

I was just thinking about fanfic tropes and the ones I love and how some of them will simply never have the same impact outside of fandom spaces. This is a hill I would die on.

The amnesia trope is one of my absolute favourites. The delicious angst, the tension of being apart and feeling something missing, probably hurting your partner because you have no idea what they mean to you. Anyway, yes, I’m a sick bitch. Thank you for noticing.

Someone could probably do it well but since fanfic has the benefit of having readers already invested in the characters and their dynamics, you can jump straight into an amnesia plot and have it start mauling everyone’s feelings right off. In a traditional book, you’d have to set all that up first (or at least throughout) and that strikes me as too clunky and would mess up the pacing and produce too big a book.

What do you think? What tropes just wouldn’t work in a novel and why? Also, am I tempting fate by putting this question out there? bc omegaverse books was never something i wanted to see and yet

'We hope you've enjoyed this Penguin audio production!'

This book was described on the blurb as “Australian gothic” and from the opening chapter prologue thing it’s immediately hitting a very cool tone that seems in line with the description (I’m not Australian so I can’t comment but the author is from Brisbane so I trust)

I copied down two entire pages because it was just so mesmerizing:

RUNAGATE—HEART OF INGLEWELL on its stone welcome sign. Thirteen streets, one remaining pub, never a bank. One grocery store with a comfortable bench outside and air-conditioning sighing through the bright plastic strips curtaining the door. A water tower patterned in white and rust and shade. Three churches, each smaller than a house. The clawing precision of hard-won roses planted in wire-fenced gardens on the buried corpses of roadside kangaroos. Geraniums hot as matches. The spice of pepperina, oleander’s poison-sapped glow, the hallowed death of angel’s trumpets as apricot as sunset. Showgrounds, handsome in dusty cream and pea-green paint; stockyards. A long low school smelling of squashed jam sandwiches, the heady scents of cheap felt-tips and novelty erasers.

Of Inglewell’s three towns, only Runagate still had a pulse. Woodwild was already nearly vanished; Carter’s Crossing had barely been. They held to each other by fraying ribbons of fractured, blue-black bitumen and cords of ribbed dirt, fringed with pale sand or beaded with blood-red pebbles (not stained by massacres, no, nor cursed, whatever people whispered about how the Spicer family first established Runagate Station).

That triangle tangle of roads and tracks held the district of Inglewell: hills and scrub glittered in the powder-white light, fading to chalk blue; sharp grasses fluttered pale in the paddocks, green and burgundy on the verge; grey huts subsided into themselves like memory. Then the plunge into purple shadows, the troll-rattle of an old timber bridge, a secret of dim emerald and the barrier-shriek of cicadas. Then up again, sky-tumbled, grass-fogged.

It was a fragile beauty: too easy to bleach with dust and history, to dehydrate with heat, rend with the retort of a shotgun or the strike of a bullbar, blind with sun on metal. Easy to turn from it, disgusted and afraid. But if you got out of a car to stretch your legs and instead were still, if you crouched down and waited, it would find you, nosing among the grass like the breeze. The light and loveliness would get into your bones, into your veins. It would beat in your blood like drumming under the ground.

Memory seeped and frayed there, where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts. There the bone horse kept pace with night drivers, while high branches shifted continuously even on breathless days and creaked with the passage of megarrities or other creatures unseen, and at midday long shadows whispered under the trees. And what trees!

Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light (the sky blue as breath, as enamel, or beaten like copper, everything beneath it turned to metal, or else translucent). Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones. The fibrous skeletons of moth-slain cactus and beetle-eaten lantern-bush leaned over the opal-veined bulk of petrified limbs spilled in empty creek beds. Trees bled resin like rubies, sprouted goitrous nests, suspended cat’s-cradles of spiderwebs, spinning disks of silk. Trees towered hard as bronze in still sunlight, and stirred like a living hide in the rolling advent of a storm.

If you were born to Runagate with all its fragile propriety, its tidy civilisation, its ring-fence of roads and paddocks, wires and blood, there was nothing else in the world beyond but trees.