Curate of Curiosities

Obviously, what we've just read covers nowhere near the entire story. In fact, I decided to download the first two volumes (of 28) of the novel from its website, and two things about it immediately stood out:

Firstly, that the main character's name is Mark Leach, same as the author. This just adds a whole new dimension of sleaze to the entire thing.

Secondly, that after the scene with God and His wife, we are treated to a relatively ordinary string, rather than the eight pages of random phrases that served as the conclusion to the DIY Novel Kit.

As for the "story"?

Well, the novel can best be described as the literary equivalent of listening to a drugged-out homeless man ramble incoherently about the end of the world, while occasionally making passes at any reasonably attractive woman that crosses his path. Remember Cinnamon? She was name-dropped a few times in the novel kit. Just from a cursory look at the second volume, I noticed that there's a scene where the narrator openly ogles her, while she is working as a "goddess" in a place called Plato's Palace, and at the same time admitting that she might be lesbian.

Then, of course, there's the question of how it's supposed to help struggling authors write their own novels. Well, content and subject matter aside, that all depends on how you feel about working with text that's essentially written by RNG. While most of the scenes in the novel have at least some relationship to the basic theme and the main character's goals, I have seen little to no cohesion from scene to scene, almost as though, as one would expect, the events of the novel were in random order.

Moreover, I believe your average would-be novelist would at least have enough self-respect to not go so low as to plagiarize someone else's work, even if said work has been placed in the public domain. Even disregarding this, it would take a Herculean effort to make this into something more digestible.

I genuinely wish to know what Mark Leach was thinking when he had the idea to invite appropriation of his novel. Could it be to increase hype for a novel whose length serves as an insurmountable barrier to your average reader, and that, even among those who have dared to even start reading it, was rather poorly received? Perhaps no one will ever know.