The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

"The nationally best-selling author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions has crafted a powerfully chilling novella--a ghost story for grownup readers. Late one evening at a party at an East Texas ranch house, five orphans gather to hear a story about a quest for a terrible weapon. Before them lies a long black box with five latches. As the owner of the box settles into a curious tale of revenge, the children grow more and more captivated, even as we grow more and more afraid that a new crime may await them all, especially as clocks in Upshur County approach midnight"--

As an OG who read HOL years ago and still have not received my t shirt that says “I survived House of Leaves”, I picked up the Fifty Year Sword with zero intention of reading it. I was drawn to the holes in the cover. Flipping through, I saw how short it was and thought: how bad could it be?
Other reviewers have done a great job of listing what is different about this story, so I wont get into it. Personally, I thought the book jacket copy was way cooler than the story itself. A sword that kills ideas! Awesome! Too bad it's not really in the book.
And how did it go from being Moze's Halloween party to whatsherface's birthday party? Nevermind, I don't care.
I can kiss a half an hour of my life away and I like the idea behind this book. Can I recommend it? No. But my hat is off to Danielewski for trying to do something different.
I do see a correlation between one star reviews from people who bought it, and two star reviews from people (like me) who borrowed it.
If you want to give it a try, I highly recommend borrowing it.

I found this to be very well written in many places, but ultimately confusing with the style of shifting between narrators mid-sentence, and the relevance of the narration-style to the story was mostly lost on me. I feel that I may want to revisit this book at a later date and really spend some time with it, perhaps using the color-coding to determine the speaker. The word-of-mouth, gossip, shared country wisdom element was well presented theoretically, but I feel that the words didn't fall together in a way that conveyed Danielewski's intention very clearly.