Mouth
The story “Behind Colin’s Eyes” is all about using figurative language to convey a sense of ominous mystery without explicit description. “The air tastes metallic like my mouth is full of pennies. Hunched over in Dad’s lap, I reach two fingers into my mouth. And as I pull them out, their new color glistens in the morning light, some shade of red I’ve never seen. Like ancient blood. I grimace and swallow the taste.” This use of sensory imagery to suggest something not quite right is going on with the narrator’s mouth is used within the context of creating a sense of strangeness. The reader is like the narrator at this point in knowing only that something very unusual, dangerous, and potential inexplicable is happening.
The Tick
Imagery is used almost literally in reference to the title of the story “Tick Talk.” “It took a moment for him to register this thing, this growth, the size and shape of a lightbulb hot with his own blood, as a tick. He kept a hand on it, feeling down its thorax to where it connected with his stomach, a lock and key fit, tight as a drum.” The most important thing that must be accomplished for this story to have its intended impact is for the reader to viscerally feel the tick on their skin the way the main character does. This example effectively contributes to that effect by giving readers a palpable sense of the shape and size of the tick as well as how strongly it has attached itself to the skin. This passage helps further the realization that merely picking a tick off yourself is not as simple as it seems.
Home
Early on in the “Night of the Chrysalis” a short bit of imagery subtly foreshadows one of the themes of the story. “She ran down the spine of the house, her body a shiver traveling over the staircase.” The language here is comparing the house to the human body as a home. The reference here is that feeling of a shiver up and down one’s spine during a moment of fear. Over the course of the story, a dollhouse will be cast as kind of a living entity capable of both feeling and stimulating emotional reactions.
The Ghost
he book is a collection of horror stories, after all, and so much of the imagery is directed toward achieving that end. The very first example appears in the very first story, “Kushtuka” when the first-person narrator writes of the initial confrontation with a mysterious and otherworldly figure. “Black hair tumbled down in wild rivulets to her elbows…She was me. Or would have been, were it not for the pupils that covered the whole of her eyes and the hideous, obscenely wide grin that distorted the lower half of her face.” The use of imagery in this example is straightforward and familiar. The description recreates a traditional portrait of a ghostly doppelganger of ourselves.
