Talk:Arizona/@comment-5547824-20150611093910

I don't know which explanation for this story's writing process I like better, that the author was drunk and wrote down every spooky thing they could think of without even trying to tie them all together, or that they wrote out a great, sweeping story and then went through it and deleted every other sentence. Either one would explain why this story doesn't even seem to try and make any sense.

The best theory I can come up with for the plot itself is that the girlfriend is a ghost/demon like the monsters chasing them or something. The problem is, once they leave the gas station the first time, the story just kind of blitzes ahead without really touching on any of the story elements enough to make them feel like they matter. Especially once the shadow girl shows up at their car, the story starts badly glossing over all of the new details, to the point where even further than that, it feels less like an actual narrative and more like a monotone list of potentially-freaky events that happened. "This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened."

Maybe this story was Spooky Elements Madlibs? Because some of them actually ended up contradicting each other. During the night of driving, the narrator just randomly throws out there that there's a "white runner" running behind them through the fog. This is the only time in the entire story where fog is mentioned and it takes place in Arizona, where I'm pretty sure fog doesn't even happen that often.

Also, why does the girlfriend call the shadow girl "colored?" Because of that I assumed this story took place in like 1948 or something and just didn't say anything, but then there are TVs and digital clocks, so I'm kind of left to believe Katie is either really racist, or secretly 80 years old. Maybe that's what the actual plot twist is.