What do you think?
Rate this book
The Writ of Years
Few things can be as terrible as to get your heart's desire.
32 pages, Unknown Binding
First published December 18, 2013
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 12, 2024
They say authors put their sweat and blood into their art but throw a cursed object into the mix and metaphor bleeds into menace. Lee Mandelo turns up the tension in The Writ of Years, a darkly delightful tale where an author battling a boozy writers block stumbles upon a mysterious quill pen that opens a world of stories before them, both cautionary fairy tales long passed down and new stories born from malevolent magic. As a pen aficionado myself, I couldn’t resist giving this a read just as much as Mandelo’s narrator cannot resist the call of the pen, particularly as I was just gifted a rather wonderful pen from a rather wonderful person:
There is a moment in this story where the narrator writes to a library asking for old tales on cursed objects and I can’t tell you how much I want that sort of email to hit my inbox. I will find you your fairy tale needs, friends. Its what I want to do.
‘What would the quill do, if I could circumvent the bloodletting to use it?’
There’s a certain charm to the fiction legend here which begins ‘there was once a quill that could not be held by any hand,’ a legend that appears in many variations, retold through an oral tradition but ultimately immortalized through the act of pen on paper preserving it for generations. Yet the pen in question is one that cannot be held, always ending in tragedies that are ‘gruesome with some variance in execution.’ A resistance to permanence it would seem. Though, as the narrator learns, one can penetrate the cursed defenses and wield it, but at what cost?
‘The moral of the story seemed to be, do look a gift horse in the mouth. The price would be paid, and the price was death.’
Managing to straddle both chilling and cozy in their sturdy, pleasing prose, Mandelo crafts a fun short story that pulls you along on a sense of amalgamating dread that reminds me a bit of Edgar Allan Poe. Particularly with a narrator plunging headlong into a situation that they know has dire consequences but too engorged on the ecstasy of it all to resist. Quick and crisp yet haunting all the same, The Writ of Years is a nice dose of darkness.
3.5/5
There is a moment in this story where the narrator writes to a library asking for old tales on cursed objects and I can’t tell you how much I want that sort of email to hit my inbox. I will find you your fairy tale needs, friends. Its what I want to do.
‘What would the quill do, if I could circumvent the bloodletting to use it?’
There’s a certain charm to the fiction legend here which begins ‘there was once a quill that could not be held by any hand,’ a legend that appears in many variations, retold through an oral tradition but ultimately immortalized through the act of pen on paper preserving it for generations. Yet the pen in question is one that cannot be held, always ending in tragedies that are ‘gruesome with some variance in execution.’ A resistance to permanence it would seem. Though, as the narrator learns, one can penetrate the cursed defenses and wield it, but at what cost?
‘The moral of the story seemed to be, do look a gift horse in the mouth. The price would be paid, and the price was death.’
Managing to straddle both chilling and cozy in their sturdy, pleasing prose, Mandelo crafts a fun short story that pulls you along on a sense of amalgamating dread that reminds me a bit of Edgar Allan Poe. Particularly with a narrator plunging headlong into a situation that they know has dire consequences but too engorged on the ecstasy of it all to resist. Quick and crisp yet haunting all the same, The Writ of Years is a nice dose of darkness.
3.5/5
May 1, 2020
bless me, goodreads, for i have sinned. it has been more than a week since my last free tor short read.
but now i am back.
There was once a quill that could not be held by any hand
i absolutely loved the writing in this one. the story itself was fairly predictable, but she does such a good job with pacing and tension, it wasn't really a deal-breaker.
she also does a great job setting the scene - full of rich sensory detail that makes her writing really come alive and create atmosphere, and fortifies the narrator's status as a writer himself:
I was digging through an estate sale in a creaky old bastard of a plantation home when I found the box. The cellar was cold and the air tasted of soil and dust; my rolled-up sleeves were smudged grey with a muddled mixture of the two. I was on my knees, flashlight in one hand, picking through a wood crate full of classic but ill-packed stationery items, mouse-nibbled envelopes, and rusty penknives. None of the lot was salvageable. Footsteps treaded over my head. I was the only one mad enough to tromp down into the cellar with only an electric torch to light the way, but it also meant that I would be the first to find anything good.
there's almost a poe-like quality to this story, in which the narrator passes restless nights, tempted by a pen said to have supernatural powers enabling its wielder to write astoundingly, wrenchingly beautiful works, but which naturally comes with a terrible price. the measured cadence of this reminds me of the raven or the tell-tale heart, with its classic-horror story tone and buildup:
The tick of the clock kept me company, whisking its way methodically past the first numeral, then the second, and finally the third. I watched lamplight glitter through the tumbled tower of ice blocks inside my glass, turned burnished gold through the whiskey I’d left unfinished. Sleep, despite my lassitude, remained distant. The lacquered box sat on my desk across the room, half-swathed in shadow. I wriggled my toes against the softness of my reading chair and sat up, unfolding my legs from beneath me. The rush of blood through my calves tingled. My first step was more a stagger, but I straightened and paced across the room. The carpet was chilly under my feet.
things come to pass pretty much as you'd expect them to, but the excellence of the writing rescues it from itself. it's definitely a good haunted-object story, and i'm going to look for more of her contributions in this free tor short project.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/12/th...
come to my blog!
but now i am back.
There was once a quill that could not be held by any hand
i absolutely loved the writing in this one. the story itself was fairly predictable, but she does such a good job with pacing and tension, it wasn't really a deal-breaker.
she also does a great job setting the scene - full of rich sensory detail that makes her writing really come alive and create atmosphere, and fortifies the narrator's status as a writer himself:
I was digging through an estate sale in a creaky old bastard of a plantation home when I found the box. The cellar was cold and the air tasted of soil and dust; my rolled-up sleeves were smudged grey with a muddled mixture of the two. I was on my knees, flashlight in one hand, picking through a wood crate full of classic but ill-packed stationery items, mouse-nibbled envelopes, and rusty penknives. None of the lot was salvageable. Footsteps treaded over my head. I was the only one mad enough to tromp down into the cellar with only an electric torch to light the way, but it also meant that I would be the first to find anything good.
there's almost a poe-like quality to this story, in which the narrator passes restless nights, tempted by a pen said to have supernatural powers enabling its wielder to write astoundingly, wrenchingly beautiful works, but which naturally comes with a terrible price. the measured cadence of this reminds me of the raven or the tell-tale heart, with its classic-horror story tone and buildup:
The tick of the clock kept me company, whisking its way methodically past the first numeral, then the second, and finally the third. I watched lamplight glitter through the tumbled tower of ice blocks inside my glass, turned burnished gold through the whiskey I’d left unfinished. Sleep, despite my lassitude, remained distant. The lacquered box sat on my desk across the room, half-swathed in shadow. I wriggled my toes against the softness of my reading chair and sat up, unfolding my legs from beneath me. The rush of blood through my calves tingled. My first step was more a stagger, but I straightened and paced across the room. The carpet was chilly under my feet.
things come to pass pretty much as you'd expect them to, but the excellence of the writing rescues it from itself. it's definitely a good haunted-object story, and i'm going to look for more of her contributions in this free tor short project.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/12/th...
come to my blog!
March 6, 2022
A lovely horror story about a cursed pen and a greedy academic who continues to pursue literary fame and fortune, even knowing the deadly end to the story. Cliched, but fun.
May 16, 2014
I've read such stories before, of magical cursed objects and their owners, victims of avarice. Such stories never have happy endings, and this one spun slowly to its inevitable end. The keyword here, is slow. The pacing improved towards the end, but I felt it was a bit sluggish for most parts.
I think one of the themes in this story is addiction. From the introduction of the main character as an alcoholic, you know this guy is not going to be good at resisting temptations. True enough, he succumbed not once, not twice, but again and again, until his life is forfeit, and even at death's door he was in the grips of addiction, unable to let go.
This story is of horror, in more ways than one.
I think one of the themes in this story is addiction. From the introduction of the main character as an alcoholic, you know this guy is not going to be good at resisting temptations. True enough, he succumbed not once, not twice, but again and again, until his life is forfeit, and even at death's door he was in the grips of addiction, unable to let go.
This story is of horror, in more ways than one.
December 20, 2013
I read this story, got to the bottom of the page, and immediately started it over again. Mandelo's writing is deep and three dimensional. It is a fantastic story.
January 2, 2014
An alcoholic with writer's block gets ahold of a cursed pen. You know this won't end well... Nice little horror story.
January 11, 2014
Oooh! A lovely little bit of not-quite horror. And a story showing how pride comes before a fall.
January 17, 2014
Nicely crafted take on the old cursed-item horror story. Well written but not outstanding.
June 13, 2016
The Writ of Years is an enjoyable contemporary take on an old tale. It's nothing new and exciting, but the writing is beautiful, and the dread builds masterfully.
November 28, 2019
Can every curse be broken?
Cursed objects aren’t something that I see very often in modern science fiction tales, so I was incredibly curious to see how this concept would be used by the author. The narrator was just about the last person on Earth who should have found this item. They had issues with self control for reasons that are better discovered by each new reader for themselves. The combination of a protagonist who was terribly impulsive and a rare object that really didn’t want to be touched only made this plot device even better.
The ending left something to be desired. There was so much foreshadowing in the beginning and middle that I was surprised by how many loose strings were left by the time the final sentence had been written. I definitely saw glimpses of what the protagonist’s fate would be, but it sure would have been nice to have a clearer understanding of how it actually played out in the end.
This story steadily dripped more and more information about the protagonist and the cursed item they discovered. I enjoyed the fact that I knew virtually nothing about either of them in the beginning but gradually put together their backgrounds as the plot progressed while still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to fill in the gaps. It only made the later scenes even more deliciously scary than they would have otherwise been.
If you’ve ever done something and then immediately regretted it, The Writ of Years might be right up your alley.
Cursed objects aren’t something that I see very often in modern science fiction tales, so I was incredibly curious to see how this concept would be used by the author. The narrator was just about the last person on Earth who should have found this item. They had issues with self control for reasons that are better discovered by each new reader for themselves. The combination of a protagonist who was terribly impulsive and a rare object that really didn’t want to be touched only made this plot device even better.
The ending left something to be desired. There was so much foreshadowing in the beginning and middle that I was surprised by how many loose strings were left by the time the final sentence had been written. I definitely saw glimpses of what the protagonist’s fate would be, but it sure would have been nice to have a clearer understanding of how it actually played out in the end.
This story steadily dripped more and more information about the protagonist and the cursed item they discovered. I enjoyed the fact that I knew virtually nothing about either of them in the beginning but gradually put together their backgrounds as the plot progressed while still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to fill in the gaps. It only made the later scenes even more deliciously scary than they would have otherwise been.
If you’ve ever done something and then immediately regretted it, The Writ of Years might be right up your alley.
April 18, 2022
Mandelo explores the all too relatable curse of writer’s block with a darker twist. Just enough grit to make me feel the sinister edge to the narrative. A creepy short little read.
August 9, 2024
An artifact that allows its owner excellent results but exacts a heavy toll. This time a pen, a writer, his life's work. Not an original story in the least, but it's a pretty good rendition.
October 22, 2014
A tak tu máme zase raz klišé o artefakte, ktorý umožňuje svojmu vlastníkovi vynikajúce výsledky, ale žiada si vysokú daň, bla bla bla bla bla... Tentokrat pero, spisovateľ, dielo jeho života...
Priemerne dielko, ktoré síce neurazí, ale ani ničím nenadchne. Skôr na spodnej hranici priemeru...
Priemerne dielko, ktoré síce neurazí, ale ani ničím nenadchne. Skôr na spodnej hranici priemeru...
December 21, 2013
3.5 stars
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews