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One short sentence followed by several others sometimes gets irritating. It breaks the flow of your reading and it makes paragraphs feel hollow. But Oates' did it exceptionally well in Beasts. The beginning of the book was strewn with short sentences that never allowed any rhythm or flow to emerge. What it did do was make me sit up and take notice of each sentence in a way that other books rarely do. What I thought was a lack of artistic flair turned out to be a precursor to a wonderfully crafted sequence which makes the short sentences worthwhile. Plums deify. Stephen King says that makes perfect (grammatical) sense, and that short sentences should suit authors who're not as much in control of their sentences as they'd like to be. But I think he's missing the kind of usage that Oates has, the kind that sometimes brings flair simply by delaying it.

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