So far in this English class we've read some pretty terrible and terrifying things. Coalhouse Walker's rampages were pretty scary and there were some tense moments when he was in the art museum. The secret orders in Mumbo Jumbo sometimes did intense things, like that bizarre killing of the official who caught Jes Grew at the beginning. And Slaughterhouse-Five was certainly not a light-hearted book, although it was sometimes funny. The killing of many innocent civilians and the horrors of war are not easy to brush off.
But so far, the book that scares me most is Kindred. While reading my back tenses up; my eyes don't leave the page. I stop hearing the music in my room and I want to ignore my brother when he asks me a question. All I want to know is does Dana escape safely? Is she going to be seriously hurt? How does she get home?
Octavia Butler is inspiring the kind of utter terror that the best books use to pull you into the story, to make you so nervous that you can hardly pick the book up for fear of what will happen while at the same time it calls to you from across the house making you itch to read it.
In no other book so far this semester have I been as intensely gripped by the story and compelled to continue reading. Not that I haven't enjoyed the other books, I have enjoyed them quite a bit. But this story is just calling to me, "Read me, read me! Find out what happens next!"
But I can't. I've finished tonight's reading and I must stop now or I'll be up all night finishing the novel and then I'll have to watch myself all week so that I don't spoil the plot for others. But I really want to know, what happens next?
1 comment:
This sense of terror is compounded, I think, by the Prologue: we know that she *does* get seriously hurt, but we know nothing about how or why or what the larger context is. And based on what we've seen so far, that context promises to be horrifying.
(Of course, it goes without saying here that the terror is also reflective of the terror of American history: the world Dana is forced to return to and occupy is reflective of the foundational economic system that built this country's wealth. This is *our* past, and like the Dresdeners in denial described by Packer, sometimes we don't want to look back. If you're American, this is *your* story, as well.)
Post a Comment