The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America's propaganda-savvy gun pimps. It's believed by people who don't read novels, play video games, or go to many movies. People actually in touch with the culture understand that what Americans really want (besides knowing all about Princess Kate's pregnancy) is The Lion King on Broadway, a foul-talking toy named Ted at the movies, Two and a Half Men on TV, Words with Friends on their iPads, and Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles. To claim that America's "culture of violence" is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.King, though, isn't just spouting personal opinions; he backs up his points for the control of assault weapons with compelling evidence. He is speaking out here less as a liberal than as a reasonable human being (which resonates with someone mostly apolitical like myself, who ultimately approaches the issue from a position of unabashed self-concern: wanting to keep my own hide safe and unperforated when venturing out in public). The essay is a poignant and persuasive piece of rhetoric, and arguably forms one of the most important works the author has ever produced. It warrants reading no matter which side a person falls on the bipartisan divide.
The ghost came to his feet, and as he rose, his legs moved out of the sunlight and painted themselves back into being, the long black trouser legs, the sharp crease in his pants. The dead man held his right arm out to the side, the palm turned toward the floor, and something fell from the hand, a flat silver pendant, polished to a mirror brightness, attached to a foot of delicate gold chain. No, not a pendant but a curved blade of some kind. It was like a dollhouse version of the pendulum in that story by Edgar Allan Poe. The gold chain was connected to a ring around one of his fingers, a wedding ring, and the razor was what he had married. He allowed Jude to look at it for a moment and then twitched his wrist, a child doing a trick with a yo-yo, and the little curved razor leaped into his hand.I could go on (the zinging dialogue, the plot twists, the humor, the pop cultural allusions...), but would rather that you go and pick up a copy of this brilliant book. Readers, first-time or returning, might be dread-stricken, but they definitely will be entertained.
By all accounts that old institution was a chamber of horrors [classically Gothic], if not in its entirety then at least in certain isolated corners. It was not simply that a particular room attracted notice for its atmosphere of desolation: the gray walls pocked like sponges [suggests an icky squishiness], the floor filthied by the years entering freely through broken windows, and the shallow bed withered after supporting so many nights of futile tears and screaming [a place of treatment or torment?]. There was something more.
Perhaps [indecisive language falls in borderland between rumor and report] one of the walls to such a room would have built into it a sliding panel, a long rectangular slot near the ceiling. And on the other side would be another room, an unfurnished room which seemed never to have been occupied. But leaning against one wall of this other room, directly below the sliding panel [suspense builds amidst repetition], would be some long wooden sticks; and mounted at the end of these sticks would be horrible little puppets [Ligotti staples].
Another room might be completely bare, yet its walls would be covered with pale fragments of weird funereal scenes [excellent assonance]. By removing some loose floorboards at the center of the room, one would discover several feet of earth piled upon an old, empty coffin [skeletons literally hidden here]. And then there was a very special room, a room I had visited myself, that was located on the uppermost floor of the asylum and contained a great windowless skylight. Positioned under that opening upon the heavens, and fixed securely in place [cosmic expansiveness juxtaposed with a sense of restriction], stood a long table with huge straps hanging from its sides.
There may have been other rooms of a strange type which memory has forbidden me [narrator admits his own unreliability]. But somehow none of them was singled out for comment during the actual dismantling of the asylum, when most of us were busy heaving the debris of years through the great breaches we had made in the asylum's outer walls, while some distance away [at a seemingly safe remove?] the rest of the town witnessed the wrecking in a cautious state of silence. Among this group was Mr. Harkness Locrian [a wonderfully Lovecraftian moniker], a thin and large-eyed old gentleman whose silence was not like that of the others. (142-43)
