Someone needs to tell that Erik Baker that using lots of big words doesn't make you sound clever, it just makes you sound like a smartarse 15-year-old trying to impress their English teacher.
> First there was the fire, the smoke billowing infernally into the Appalachian night. It just kept burning. Days of insatiable flame. A black pillar of fumes took up residence above the town like an inert tornado. At its heart, we learned, was the corpse of a train, fifty cars off the rails
To me, even Shakespeare’s Richard III didn’t begin with this level of overly flowery poetic structure.