Review: More Confusing Than Enlightening
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 18, 2013
Short story writing is an art form that requires creating a fictional world and characters, setting up a plot and then resolving it all in the matter of a few pages. It requires a lean story telling style that gets down to the essentials quickly. Unfortunately, T. Lucas Earle's The 13th Prophet is ultimately too clever for its own good, employing a rather bizarre manner of narration that never becomes sufficiently clear in the short space available.The premise of the story is provocative. At some future time, people buy personalities the same way they buy clothes now. They mix and match various character traits such as passion, care, and courage to create their own personality. These traits are obtained from a group of 12 "prophets," whose own personalities are replicated. One of the prophets is murdered, and the "manufacturer" could be in big trouble if his personality disappears.  The CEO of the company hires Mulligan Burke, an old school PI, to find out who killed the prophet.Of course, in 20 pages, there's not a lot of time for detective work, but Burke does get to the bottom of what happened. The reader will probably not be as fortunate, since Earle's writing style is very muddled and confusing. His attempts at explaining how the prophets operate never really make sense. I can accept that, in science fiction, we have to take a lot of the "how" on faith; the problem here is that we never get a really good idea of the "what." Eventually, readers can, more or less, figure out what's happening, but short stories don't allow much time for gradual revealing of subtle plot nuances, and this story is almost over before the reader understands what should have been made more clear in the first five pages.I don't need or expect to be spoonfed every little plot detail in a science fiction story, but I do not want an overuse of stylized writing to render the story more difficult than it should be to follow.