Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

Pure Hebridean desolation. A beautiful, haunted place that breaks pastoralism on the rocks and leaves it, belly gouged, for hungry gulls to mercy-kill—but the gulls are all gone. Dear Esther puts you on a remote island, following in the footsteps of foolish wounded men. Its narration jumps between three threads: the aftermath of car crash in which the narrator's wife(?) died; the island's history given by an unreliable 19th-century author; and the narrator's account of their time on the island, which grows increasingly disjointed from your own actions. The moment-to-moment writing's at its worst when it binds these threads together with hollow similes that have no thematic bridge, cheaply using tenuous aesthetic similarities to connect stories better left to loosely co-exist and co-inform. In fact, weak similes are a running theme. Verbose; the best moments are often the silences where the atmosphere can breathe.