Back History
Within the first five paragraphs, on the opening page, the back story of the novel’s narrator that will be filled in later is foreshadowed through efficient use of imagery. Keep in mind that the author has thrown the reader into the story with no context whatever about this strange world and its bizarre creatures. And so the reader has had almost literally no time at all to adjust to the weird of the here and now before suddenly being shown another aspect of this place:
“…for a dangerous moment, this thing I’d found was from the tidal pools of my youth, before I’d come to the city. I could smell the pressed-flower twist of the salt and feel the wind, knew the chill of the water rippling over my feet. The long hunt for seashells, the gruff sound of my father’s voice, the upward lilt of my mother’s. The honey warmth of the sand engulfing my feet as I looked toward the horizon and the white sails of ships that told of visitors from beyond our island.”
Sensory Detailing
One of the primary uses of imagery throughout the narrative serves the purpose of creating the world. Sensory details pile one upon the other over the course of the book to make this otherworldly universe inhabited by the players more tangible:
“It was early in that year, far into a chilly evening. The wind gushed up out of the dark, broke against the balcony stone to bring the faint sting of river smells, and I heard the reassuring hut-hut-hooting of owls and the sounds of stealthy things moving through the underbrush below. I remember thinking that the creatures we couldn’t see had no use for us, went about their business without the need to figure us into their plans.”
Meet the Future
The novel is set in a future that looks fairly unrecognizable to the world in which it was written. The specifics are not outlined in this description of that future, but the imagery makes it clear enough what the situation probably looks like. That vision may alter from reader to reader, but then that is one of the points of engaging imagery rather than simple factual description:
“Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”
Mord
There is really no simply describing the character of Mord with appropriate distillation. It is a creation to be savored over the breadth of this strange story of a strange world populated by strange creatures. Imagery can be quite definite and specific—it need not be poetically ambiguous—as demonstrated in this exhibition of the one of the stranger aspects of Mord:
“...they were all golden bears, all huge in their hideous beauty, much taller than a man, with thick muscles that, in their stride and bounding, came at times to the surface of their fur like the hardness of a vine-wreathed tree trunk wrung and stretched taut. Yet they moved so lithe and sinuous they could’ve been snakes or otters or flowing water pushed along in a strong current. Monstrous gold-brown blurs, they took apart the feral children with a gruff, ballet-like ease, the footprints on that dusty floor splattered with blood and offal.”
