EXILE
 The cover graphic is wild, chaotic. The first page gives away nothing about the nature of the story ahead.  That was enough to get me intrigued.  The three frames there were distracting, though, not allowing total immersion in the content.  They always reminded you were you had started, giving you a handle on reality, on the statistics of the novel, on hints.  I got rid of them and clicked through.  The quality and atmosphere of the writing made up for the lengthy lexia in the beginning.  The sunset in the first page is reflected in the background colors, the mood is calm and the scrolling is welcome.  After a while though, I wished some of them were shorter, as they dragged on for screens and screens.  The upside of that was that each lexia stood as a unit, not a lost excerpt.  It knew what it had to tell you and gave you entire thoughts or events, which the links clarified, gave background information about, or drew you deeper into the story.  One thing remained unclear though. Some lexia had the same background texture and I wonder if they are meant to form some sort of greater unity.
   Just about every page has a really interesting picture at the bottom.  I later found out that these were the links that lead to the chronological sequence the artist had in mind.  The graphics were extremely interesting and intricately designed, but sometimes the relevance was not clear, and at other times they placed you at the scene, put you in a chair, or gave a vibrant picture of a character's dynamic personality(right).   When unsure which link to follow, they kept the fluidity going.  One thing I liked a lot which did not really happen in some of the other stories is that you can always spot links you have visited even if you see them in another page, and so you never ended up going back to a place you had been to.  Even though this sounds intuitive, I got stuck in annoying loops in a couple of stories I tried to read.   There was extensive use of bad poetry, though, that is the lyrics to one of the character's songs.  I was happy to see that there was no accompanying music that would have overdone the use of different media(not to mention bringing that poetry to a life it does not deserve).
   There were a few terminal pages which are put to very good use.  In one sentence, Hardaker writes, "the conversation made us stop in our tracks." The story stopped in its tracks. Some like this last page had a notebook background and script format.  I was not quite sure about the significance or necessity of such a drastic change in presentation.  "Exile" by Mark Hardaker is a cool read. The strange thing was that out of the stories I read or tried to read it was the one that was most structurally sound from the writer's aspect.  Other stories seemed to just give snapshots that didn't make a coherent whole, like Shoulder to the Wheel.

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