A Lovely Harmless Monster

Editing: ff-ducks

((header))
title:Fact-Free Ducks
author:matt
tags:mods
date:2025-04-26
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<h1 id="pagetitle">$$title$$</h1>

*Ducks, Newburyport* is a 2019 novel famous for completely eschewing full stops in favor of clauses that begin with the phrase "the fact that". That phrase appears in the book 19,000 times. Here's the beginning of the book, from the kindle preview:

![](/files/duckspreview.jpg)

I wondered what the book would be like if it were readable, so I used a computer program to replace every instance of ", the fact that" with ".". Since the book has sentences now, I also made sure the first letter of each of them was capitalized. "The fact that" still appears from time to time, anytime a non-comma punctuation mark was used to separate clauses, but the vast majority of them are gone. The result is a book that's still cool and postmodern, but you can read more than a few sentences of. This is how it reads now:

>The fact that the raccoons are now banging an empty yogurt carton around on the driveway. In the early morning stillness it sounds like gunshots. Even in fog, with ice on the road and snow banks blocking their vision, people are already zooming around our corner, the site of many a minor accident. A guy in a pickup once accidentally skidded into our *garage*, and next time it could be our *house*, or a *child*, Wake Up Picture Day, dicamba, Kleenex. A pickup truck killed Dilly. She’d successfully dodged cars for three whole years. She knew all about cars, but during that time the traffic grew. It’s crazee now. After Dilly got killed, the kids painted a big warning sign with a big black cat on it and stuck it right by the fence, but nobody notices it. They’re all going too fast to see it, ♫ *When the cat died we had catnip tea* ♫. Failure to yield causes one in five accidents in Ohio. Car crashes are up twenty percent since 2009, haw tree, buckeye, black walnut, hickory, butternut. Stacy’s old enough to handle the road but the other kids aren’t.

Download it here: [factfreeducks.mobi (1.49 MB)](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1YOqAPhQRmAny1gId7xKDn1jh8AWFDlLU)

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