Stop the Similes!

[Marni]

I am starting a Stop the Tortured Similes movement.

Here is a description of the aurora borealis in "Walden On Wheels":

“A pale green band appeared. It inched across the sky, a luminous caterpillar slowly nibbling its way to the eastern horizon. Then several bands of light materialized—all parallel to one another—making it look as if the firmament wore a celestial comb-over. Those pale bands began to pulse. One ball after another would move down the green bands like a family of rabbits being digested by a python.”

"Rocket Girl" is also burdened by "creative" writing.

Which books would you like to nominate for de-similization?

[Richard]

Suggested rewrite: "It was a dark and stormy night. A pale green band of the aurora borealis peeked down throught the storm clouds . . . "

[Samantha]

"We were like two different colored rivers becoming one, each coming from wildly different sources - I came from the concrete dam of student debt, and she from the melting glaciers of depression, where her very existence hung in the balance."
UGH.

[Marni]

Oh golly, is that from Walden, too? There were so many...

[Marni]

From "Death in the Baltic":
p. 134: "A heap of bodies, crushed under the stampeding feet of escaping passengers, blocked her way like corks in a bottle."
p. 146: "Their occupants had succumbed to cold and exhaustion, and had fallen into the sea like trees felled from a lumberjack's axe."