The Serpent in the Grove: The Next 1000 Words (Spoiler warning)

I have more free credits today. So, I fed the next thousand words of The Serpent in the Grove into Pangram — still 100% AI generated, with high confidence. Once you get past the purple prose, it's an engaging story, and I'm enjoying reading it. 

A good source of links about the story is Laura Miller's article on him in Slate. It's a takedown piece, though, and nearly all her passages about him contain a sting in the tail. 

I must take issue with one of them. She says, "He can talk about growing up in a 'rural sugarcane village in Trinidad,' and how the ravages of alcoholism that he witnessed there became the seed for his story". The sting in the tail is "(in which alcohol plays, at most, a minor role)." 

This is hardly fair. It is alcohol that fuels farmer Vishnu's belief that the village hottie Zoongie wants him enough for him to want to kill his wife Sita to get with her. It is even less fair when it is clear from these thousand words that he has used rum for courage in crafting and executing his plot to kill her. 

What I think is less forgivable about the story are lapses in logic, of which there are a few. AI is notorious for never letting logic get in the way of good atmosphere. 

The first one occurs when Sita falls into the well. She does not do what most people would do in that situation: "She did not call out loud." This is because she thought that the only person who would hear her was the person who was clearly trying to kill her.

Yet this is obviously false. Not only is their neighbor Marsha in a position to hear "pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel" from that area, but it is the very absence of that noise that draws her to the well. Sita's cries for help would surely have reached her.

The second one is in the quick ease with which Marsha can fashion a vine to pull Sita to safety. We know that Sita sensed danger in the air at the outset. That was why she told Puttie to go "‘Play by Auntie Marsha’". But she didn't think to take a vine to tether herself to a tree for safety, given the "plank mouth and the cutlass leaning casual, as if it had legs"?

There are other oddities that are relatively minor. As Sita is sliding into the well, "The circle of sky above shrank to a coin." But Marsha "tore a length of vine from a mango trunk, peeled it in her hands to feel if it would hold a woman." That doesn't present the impression at all that the vine is long enough to reach a woman to whom the circle of sky above would be nothing but a coin. But I accept a few cheats for dramatic effect.

Also, when Marsha first arrives, she sees "the ring of stone, the lifted planks, the scuffed rope." One can only wonder why the scuffed rope was not good enough to throw down to Sita in the first place. Maybe it looked strong enough to carry a pail, but not a woman? I just tend to think of rope as a stronger thing than a vine.