Breaking the rules. Is it OK?

I recently finished reading Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing. Great book.  It’s a rollercoaster ride that takes off on Page 1 and doesn’t stop. It’s brutal and profane, but it’s a ton of fun.  I loved the voice, and I loved the structure of the novel. It’s not written in long chapters, but shorter chunks. Sometimes they are only a few lines long. They really helped establish the book’s pace – which is rocket-like.

One thing you’ll notice reading the book, though, is the lack of quote marks. Instead, Huston uses dashes at the beginning of a line to indicate someone’s speaking. There are no dialogue tags either.

It was something I thought would bother me when I first started reading, but a page or two into it I was fine without the quotes. I did get me wondering, though, what others thought about this kind of rule bending.

How much are you willing to put up with something like creative punctuation in a novel? Does it bother you when an author breaks the rules?