"What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair."
This story was certainly fitting for the end of October. It was kind of creepy, but that just happens to be the type of thing I enjoy! Not the whole sleeping next to a dead body for 50 years, but hearing about things that are creepy. Anyway, the thing that really makes this story work is the lack of a denouement. The suspense and information leading up to the final sentence are all presented in a very dull and indifferent manner. There is not much going on, and the reader may even lose interest. BUT WAIT! In the last two paragraphs, we find out Miss Emily Rose's grave secret: she killed her lover and has been hiding him in her house ever since! If that isn't enough to draw a reader back in, I don't know what is. And to add even more to the intrigue, she had been sleeping in bed with the decaying body all that time. There you have it. A story that seemed dull and anticlimactic just exploded into a story of a deranged murderer. How can the author do this and maintain his style throughout? By explaining the climactic ending in the same dull manner. There are no exciting or active verbs used in the last two paragraphs that change the tone of the story at all; however, the action itself changes the story completely.
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