Monster Island - Pithy Goodness

From what I read of Monster Island, I was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the writing and the story. The writing isn't particularly clever of interesting in itself, but it is very concise. By the end of the first chapter it was clear to me that the author was writing simply to tell a story. He wasn't trying to impress his readers with fancy language or clever literary devices, and he wasn't trying to amaze them with long, detailed descriptions of characters and environments. The writing was just a necesary medium to communicate with the reader, and the author clearly knew exactly what he wanted to say. As I was reading there was one block of text that really stuck with me, because I was fully expecting it to turn into a long rambling speculative monologue:
"If the Warlady died there would be nothing to hold the Women’s Republic of Somaliland together. Clan factions would tear it apart. How long could a country in the middle of a civil war resist the dead?"
After the author posed the question, he simply moved on with the story. It was as if he was saying, "you think about it," rather than "this is the question I am going to answer for you." This sort of direct connection with the author made reading Monster Island alot more fun. It may also be a large part of what makes blogging and reading bloggs enjoyable for so many people.
It would be interesting to see a novel written in this sort of direct-connection format and then moved to book form. The reception of Monster Island was probably much different than it would have been had the novel simply been in book form. I can sure for certain that if I had purchased a book like Monster Island only to find it written in that short pithy style, I would have felt, at best, cheated. But I also would have blazed through the novel fairly quickly and probably enjoyed it more much than a novel with a more traditional writing style. It will be interesting to see how peoples expectations for novels in general change as blogging becomes more of a standard method for communication.