/lit/ - Literature

Here's the plot of Call of the Arcade

> two main characters are Mark and Johnny, age 18
> Johnny is damaged, he was raped or something in his childhood, he's very fragile and easily cries
> Mark is protective of him
> they go to haunted house and find a strange arcade machine after a half hour of wandering around
> arcade machine is called the Polybius
> it's a top secret machine that has been hidden for 30 years by top government officials, lore is that it was made by aliens
> the haunted house owner (later revealed to be a turncoat cult member) transfers the contents of the Polybius to a flash drive and gives it to Mark
> Sam is an older haunted house employee
> 30 years ago, Sam's little brother committed suicide after playing the Polybius too much
> Sam becomes obsessed with the Polybius games
> he gained the ability to hypothesize people and cause them to kill themselves
> he hypnotized his mother and friend, who then both kill themselves
> sam says he's part of a cult called the Ouroborus and asks Mark to give the Polybius to him
> Mark says no and he and Johnny run away
> Sam chases them but gets caught by the police
> members of Sam's cult had ratted him out to the police
> the next day, the two boys start a normal day at school
> however, Sam is there
> he escaped jail by hypnotizing the police and the guards and causing them to kill themselves
> now he's killing their classmates
> Johnny has an emotional support lizard and feeds it a rapid growth potion that he got as a gift from the haunted house cult member
> Mark feeds his rapid growth potion to a beetle
> Sam feeds his potion to some other bug
> the little creatures grow in size and gain elemental abilities
> Mark, Johnny, and Sam all get real life Pokemon
> all three shout commands at the Pokemon and they attack
> the giant lizard spits a fireball at Sam
> Sam dies
> Mark and Johnny take shelter in a room and .....
> It was all a creative writing presentation by Mark
> Mark's teacher gives him an A+
> Excellent work, Mark
> But then ......
> Mark is inside the Polybius, it was all a simulation, he's still in the haunted house
> Polybius tells Mark to kill himself, just like Sam's little brother
> Mark breaks free from the Polybius and then destroys the machine
> Johnny walks in, puzzled at why his friend is breaking a machine in the haunted house
> Mark says he doesn't want to tell that story

The end

>>17869524
That can't be true. I refuse to believe that something like that would get any kind of notoriety. I refuse!

Jannies have been banning OP and deleting his threads. Remember to report him for advertising if you think it's funny and want it to continue.

stop shilling you fucking hack

>>17869539
F Gardner is "famous" on /lit/ because he took the initiative to make consistent self-serve ads and is a generally decent person on the boards, not because his novels are any good.

His books also have the advantage of being easy reads, even if they are riddled with grammatical and typographical errors

>>17869524
Lost my shit at the Pokemon part. This sounds fucking amazing.

>>17869524
This all happenes in like 100 pages???

>>17869658
the novel is heavy on dialogue, characters simply say what is happening. The dialogue is formatted into one giant paragraph instead of on separate lines, so that artificially decreases the page count by at least 15

>>17869681
Huh that's how plays read. Neat. Alright you've sold me. I'll buy it. How is there a profit if this is only 5bucks though?

>>17869712
>>17869712
Call of the Arcade is 125 pages, 8.5 x 11 inches, I'm assuming black ink on white paper, although it could be cream. For $5, FG will get $0.65 per book.

Because of the low price, he is not eligible for expanded distribution (ie, his book sold in brick and mortor bookshops). Realistically, not never have happened anyway so why not lower the price

>>17869759
Do summaries of the rest Kek

>>17869858
I got Call of the Arcade when Gardner made it free during his Kindle Select promotion period. I didn't enjoy it and honestly I don't want to read any more of his works.

Still, if he makes the rest of his books free then I'd download his books and make greentexts. Can't beat a free book

>>17870299
Did you made the greentext?>>17869524
you sure made it sound fun.

>>17869426
"Call of the Crocodile" is the first installation in Gardner's breakout series of horror novels. The story follows its protagonist, a young boy named Faggot Gardner (no relation to F. Gardner, the author), as he searches the grimy streets of Chicago for "the Crocodile", a local leather daddy notorious for putting bad little boys like Gardner in their place.
Young Faggot Gardner searches high and low for the fabled dominant: in dilapidated crack dens, in public restrooms, in subterranean glory holes. Yet no matter how assiduously he searches, how quickly he moves from clue to clue, how many dirty men's toes he sucks (an activity constantly referred to in the novel as "pussing the boots"), Gardner seems always to be one step behind the object of his obsessive desire.
The twist comes near the end of the novel, during a scene reminiscent of Polanski's "Repulsion", where the beautiful Carole, played by a young Catherine Deneuve, finally descends into madness, and hallucinates human arms reaching out of the walls of her apartment and grabbing her, thereby externalizing her fear not only of sexual assault, but of any form of intimate contact whatsoever. F. Gardner (the author) parodies this scene, effectively turning its tone and implications upside down, by having his protagonist, the now cock-starved and desperate Faggot Gardner (again, no relation) crawl on his knees through a dark apartment, groping along the walls to find his way, only to feel, poking proudly out of the holes in the walls, not scary arms with grabby hands, but dozens of diamond-hard dicks. They poke him in the eyes. They shoot gobs of bitter gravy into his nose and ears. They wag reproachfully at him, like the index fingers of the stern private school teachers who buggered him in his earliest childhood memories, as he slowly makes his way to the end of the hall. The twist is this: when he finally reaches the end of the hall, and opens the door there, he finds himself staring into a blinding white light. He believes that when his eyes finally adjust to the glare, he will see there, waiting for him, horse-whip in hand, croc-skin chaps pulled snugly against his obese thighs, the man he has been seeking for so many days, seeking, in a way, for all of his life. But instead what he sees is a hospital room. He is lying in a hospital bed. The bright light is coming from the naked bulb above him. There is a nurse at his side, changing his IV fluids.
"Where am I?" he asks.
"Loretto Hospital," the nurse replies.
"I was eaten by a crocodile, wasn't I?" he asks.
"No," she says. "You were violently assaulted by hundreds of corpulent and diseased men, with disgusting rotten teeth and putrid breath. That's why you smell like corpses and semen."
"No," he says firmly. "I was eaten by a crocodile. It caused my family to go insane. I'm going to write a novel about it, and force people to read it."
"Whatever you say, Faggot," the nurse replies.

>>17870335
Yeah, I made the greentext. The plot itself is creative and fun, but reading the book itself was tedious. Nearly every sentence had an error or typo in it. Sometimes he'd open a dialogue with a quotation mark " and he wouldn't close it. Or he'd start a sentence and then stop in the middle of the sentence. Some sentences were missing verbs entirely. It's like he wrote it when he was in a fever dream and never edited it.

Even if the technical elements were correct, I didn't like Gardner's writing in general. He has this habit of saying the same thing multiple times, possibly as a way to pad the word count of an already short book. For example, in the first chapter, there was a paragraph like
> Mark and Johnny were 18 years old and seniors in high school. They were adults and in the fourth year of secondary school. The two friends finished all four years of high school. Soon they would go to college. They were nervous because they had to leave the familiar habitat of high school and go to college. College was different than high school and that make them nervous. They were of legal age in high school and anxious about applying to college.

>>17870373
>F. Gardner (the author) parodies this scene, effectively turning its tone and implications upside down, by having his protagonist, the now cock-starved and desperate Faggot Gardner (again, no relation) crawl on his knees through a dark apartment, groping along the walls to find his way, only to feel, poking proudly out of the holes in the walls, not scary arms with grabby hands, but dozens of diamond-hard dicks. They poke him in the eyes. They shoot gobs of bitter gravy into his nose and ears. They wag reproachfully at him, like the index fingers of the stern private school teachers who buggered him in his earliest childhood memories,
kek 10/10

>>17870397
>that greentext portion

i get a similar vibe from this classic work

>>17870420
kek, Gardner's dialogue is actually like that

>>17870397
>possibly as a way to pad the word count of an already short book.

wait but I thought you said he artificially decreases the page count?

Call of Cockodile NFT when

>>17870544
125 kindle pages is a short book. Although for the page count comment, I was just making a rude comment about how he squeezes multiple lines of dialogue into one paragraph

Kek I love seeing this lil nigga's ads everywhere

>>17870583
Seems unconventional but I don't see that as a problem. Thanks for the rundown.

>>17869426
Behead All Satans guy and Horia didn't even shill for as long as this man come on.