The Bee Sting (Murray)

The Bee Sting
Pauy Murray (2023)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This book was a Pandemic Book Club selection. It was also a 600+ page slogfest. If it had not been for the book club, I would have DNF'ed it 100 pages in -- by 200 for sure. As it was, I still had 150 pages to go when the meeting happened. I had already been spoiled that the book was left open-ended, which after 640 pages is a little outrageous. During the meeting, I discovered just what it was that was left open-ended. I was satisfied that I didn't need to read this book.

At the point where I considered dropping this book, I wrote the following on Good Reads:

First, there are no quotation marks, which gets a little confusing. Then almost all of the other punctuation disappears. Then there’s a slog of a chapter that’s literally 100 pages long, and you want to k!ll yourself instead If this hadn’t been a book club book, I wouldn’t have pushed on as far as I did, and I still couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I just didn’t care about anybody, how their lives were or where they’d end up, or even about that bee sting A good editor would’ve cut between 2-300 pages from this monstrosity. If there was a reason for it to be this long, I never got to it.

After the meeting, I was happy to put that book aside and read something else, The Bartender Between Worlds, which I enjoyed very much.

I started reading the next Book Club pick, but then I decided that I would power through this book.

Let me say right off: it didn't get better. It got worse. For the last 100 pages or so, it switched to Second Person POV, because it needed a fresh layer of Hell. And it applied this to all the different POV characters that it had. It wasn't using it to make the reader the POV character.

Yes, playing with the format might've been a storytelling tactic. It was an absolutely abyssmal choice.

The icing on the wedding cake came in Part III when it switched to a script format, except it wasn't a script. Just the formatting on the page was so you'd know with Second Person POV was involved in this bit. The main reason for the script, as far as I can tell, was because all the players were being brought onto a single stage so that open-ended ending could take place.

I never got the answer to my question, why this book had to be so long. On the other hand, they did address the "bee sting" in a way that explained why it was important enough to be the title of the book, and like so much that came before it, everything is a lie.

In the end, every adult is morally reprehensible for one reason or another, and when faced with a moral quandary tend to fail.

But, I got through this book and can return to next month's book, which is already better, and not quite as long.

If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs. A fantastical foursome of flash fiction and short stories.