I don’t care how good the story or the rest of the book is—if you don’t use quotation marks for the dialog, I’m not reading it.
@schuth tbh I’d settle for anything. I keep running across completely punctuation-free dialogue in a lot contemporary fiction, and it seems like an annoying stylist pretense, i.e., none of these authors is James Joyce or anywhere close. YMMV, obviously.
@petebrown Seems like I mostly run across this in translation, or reading Cormac McCarthy. I didn’t realize it had become A Thing.