The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote… and then he proceeds to add in notes to the “abridged version” mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.
Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just “the cool scenes you thought of in your head” and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn’t have to connect them.
And it slaps
I used to work at a used bookstore, and had a group of three teenage boys come in wanting the “Unabridged Version” of Princess Bride.
They would not believe that it was a narrative device and the unabridged version didn’t exist. Said no author would credit someone else for their own writing, that was ridiculous, and was there a guy who knew about fantasy they could talk to?
I grabbed a coworker and left him to deal with it. Heard him explaining the concept of a pen name as I walked away.
ALT
