I’d caught her mid-shift, halfway between a wife and a bat.
Clyde is ostensibly just a grandfatherly old man. But he’s a grandfatherly old Italian in somewhat the way that Vito Corleone became by the end of The Godfather. All is not as it seems. Clyde is a vampire, you see. And, yes, he becomes one of the vampires in the lemon grove. It is a vampire story of the kind that has become traditional in the new millennium: vampires of a different sort. Changes are taking place from the Hollywood Bela Lugosi historical paradigm. Amidst all this refining of myth occurs this line which the author recognizes as significant through its structural apportionment. It exists in isolation from the paragraph above and the paragraph below. It is one of those sentences that draws the reader up short and forces them—through coercion rather than actual force, actually—to rethink the whole of everything they think they know. This business of turning into bats is taken to the next level and one cannot read this without looking at the transformation completely differently.
Antarctic tailgaters know exactly how hard it is to party.
Dougbert’s rules are a complex design based upon the conceptualization of tailgating. The story is constructed as an exercise in ironic humor. The problem is that sports and all its various tangential associations are ripe for irony and as such the whole thing eventually falls sort of flat. Worth a read, but not the strongest story in the collection. The savior of this story is this single sentence. The author once again cannot be faulted for failing to recognize a significance sentence. It is, like the above example, set off in isolation by itself. Notice the italicized “hard” in the sentence. The author may not yet have become a master of the short story, but one cannot offer a defensible argument against the assertion of being a master of the sentence. For reasons too complicated to put into this small space, the reader truly interested in critical understanding needs to know that this is a masterful sentence within the context of what surrounds it. It makes the story entirely worth reading to understand exactly what makes this sentence worth extracting for an example of a great quote.
Scarecrows made fools of the birds and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red
Here we have a quote from a story that doesn’t sit in isolation, but is an example of how efficiently the writer is capable of seamlessly introducing an effective piece of descriptive prose into the story. This is from the opening paragraph of the story and shows up about a third of the way through that paragraph. The story begins with an introduction to a scarecrow lashed to an oak tree. Dorothy’s best friend in Oz notwithstanding, scarecrows are pretty freaky things to those who haven’t grown on a farm and that freakish quality is set quickly and effectively. What makes this excerpt valuable for study, however, is not the scarecrow part, but how subtly Larry tells us important information about himself. From that element contained within the parenthetical, one learns enough about Larry to fully understand everything which follows.
