Opening Lines
The author chooses to use imagery as the literary device at the forefront of the opening scene. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the imagery is directed toward creating a sense of place even though setting will not prove to be overly significant as the story plays out:
"It was a wild, windy, southwestern spring when the idea of killing Mr. Griffin occurred to them...Susan McConnell leaned into the wind and cupped her hands around the edges of her glasses to keep the blowing red dust from filling her eyes. Tumbleweeds swept past her like small, furry animals, rushing to pile in drifts against the fence that separated the field from the parking lot."
The Non-Living Room
An interesting use of imagery occurs a little while later in the description of a room inside a house. One of the conspirators is moving through the house which is ironically brought to life by virtue of imagery describing its lifelessness:
"He went into the living room, a dark, small room with a musty smell. He had often wondered why it was a called a `living room,' since it seemed to have less life than any other room in the house...The only thing alive in the whole living room was the telephone, and it sat silent on its hook so much of the time it might as well not have existed at all."
Not Nice
The teenagers at the heart of the plot to carry out the titular crime are, to put it bluntly, not nice. In fact, they are better described as odious, noxious and downright unpleasant. Even the girl.
"She moved closer and bent over, studying the man's face. She had never been this close to Mr. Griffin before. She could see the afternoon growth of hair prickling beneath the smooth white skin and the black mustache moving slightly with the breath from his nostrils. His neck was thin and pale and his Adam's apple jutted out like a doorknob. She though, he's ugly."
Quick: Look up!
Every once in a while, a reader comes across a piece of imagery that carries the potential power to make one stop what they are doing and follow the lead set by the prose. Such is the case in this example. It is not impossible to look up while reading it, but certainly the impulse is there:
"In the far corner of the room there was a cobweb, a wisp of lace caught in a beam of morning sunlight. Had some industrious spider created that masterpiece overnight, or had it been there, unnoticed, for days? It was strange the things you saw when you look at the ceiling—really concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else."
