Max Barry - A Shade Less Perfect

I know what I'll be reading on the train ride home.... comments to follow...

Update: So I missed the train by 30seconds and read this during the 40 minute wait for the next, story started well with the introduction of the 4 main characters, and by the second page I was sure Max was writing some trashy porno for alt.fetish.wife.swappers or something, but thankfully it was nothing of the sort. Instead it was a darn fine story with an interesting twist.

I'm can see the story being expanded into a full novel sometime, set 10 or so years later. Similar in nature to Clive Barkers "A Thief of Always" or "Abarat", but with Max's quirky style.

Update 2: Well, it seems the story, blog entry, and comments have all dissapeared from Max's website...

However, as the image shows, I'm not dreaming things... Max - whats up? One thing I did find interesting was the Creative Commons licencing of the story, but now its dissapeared, I wonder if Max (or his publishers) had other thoughts...

Update 3: Ok, I hate my ISP. It's playing annoying silly buggers, after sending Max an email wondering if he pulled it, I was pleasantly surprised to get a reply (even though I've had email from Max before) within 2 hours of sending it:

Hi Mark,

Nobody pulled anything! It's still up. Maybe you had some caching issue and saw an old version of my site? ISPs can do that. They're naughty.

Glad to hear you liked it! Thanks for the blog mention, too. Dunno about a novel... it's really just a single-twist tale. Fun to write, though.

Max.

[amrk@spawn ~]$ wget http://www.maxxbarry.com/misc/shade.rtf
--23:22:35--  http://www.maxxbarry.com/misc/shade.rtf
           => `shade.rtf'
Resolving www.maxxbarry.com... 206.123.101.93
Connecting to www.maxxbarry.com[206.123.101.93]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
23:22:36 ERROR 404: Not Found.

[amrk@spawn ~]$

Of course, it now all works, and my original paranoia is doublefold, not to mention the end of my plot to sell a rare Max Barry manuscript on ebay.com :(

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