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These regrets, you decide, do him credit as a person, if not as a detective, and you find yourself feeling a bit sorry for him. Isn’t that the risk that readers face in the first-person point of view? That you cannot help but identify with a Humbert Humbert as much as with a Huck Finn? And doesn’t that leave you vulnerable to manipulation and misdirection?
“We all decide to tuck ourselves into beds like little babies, to stop thinking anything, to stop doing anything. To stop living, essentially. It’s creepy. What are we at three a.m. but a nation of corpses, waiting to be reborn in the morning?”
There is something particularly awful about horror in broad daylight.
People hunger for epiphany, you think, they clamor for it, but, given a chance, who among us would actually recognize it? Or, having seen it, would choose to act?
The human body is a feeble thing, and there are many ways to die.
The discrepancy between these two dry facts speaks to the brutal realities of gender, power, and physical violence in domestic life, the harsh secrets of the closed doors behind which men have loved and hated and killed women for centuries.
that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
Q: Where were you between the hours of midnight and two a.m.? A: Drunk. Q: That’s not a location. A: On the contrary. It’s a nation-state with its own laws and traditions. Well populated. I’ve been a citizen in good standing for years.
If one surveys the full canon of humanity’s creative output, it’s easy to write off generations of mankind as a bloodthirsty and lip-smacking horde of sadists cheering as Hector is mutilated, Lavinia raped, and Fortunato entombed—all while Hannibal Lecter tucks in his napkin to savor his latest meal.
Violence is an addiction, like everything else.
