My book club spent 6 weeks on a story that barely had any plot

Last spring our group picked this long online serial called 'The Yellow House' thinking it'd be a slow burn, but after 6 weeks of weekly discussions we realized the author just kept describing the same crack in the ceiling for 15,000 words. The whole thing had no real payoff or twist, just a lot of pretty sentences about peeling paint. I feel like people confuse 'slow burn' with 'nothing happens' way too often. Has anyone else run into a story that was labeled a slow burn but really just dragged on without earning its length?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler_craig6d ago

wait so did anyone in the group actually call it out earlier or was everyone just nodding along hoping it would go somewhere? i feel like six weeks is a long time to stick with something that's clearly going nowhere, especially if the author is just describing a crack in a ceiling for 15,000 words. like, were people too polite to say something or did they genuinely think it was building toward something?

faith_schmidt6d ago

Okay but honestly sometimes you just get stuck in that loop of hoping the next chapter will finally have a point, right? I've been there before and it's rough because you don't want to be the one to kill the group's vibe.