Sometimes, I run across a bit of descriptive narrative that is so tasty that I am compelled–compelled, I say! *heh*–to savor the thing again and again, eating the self-renewing tidbit up in tiny bites, over and over. This is the meat of one such tasty tidbit:
He’d never been in this room before; this was where they took people who had done things that were just short of murder or robbery, a darkly somber room that left no doubt in the prisoner’s mind that he had trespassed on at least five of the Ten Commandments.
…just short of murder or robbery, of course. *heh* But that still leaves eight commandments…
That’s just too good. Economical, evocative, expanding the scene on multiple levels. Fun.
Update: ‘nother one; this one is from a John Lambshead short story, As Black As Hell:
Chaos theory insists that a single flap of a butterfly’s wing in China can change the direction of a hurricane in the West Indies, sparing one island to devastate another. This may or may not be true. Certainly Chinese butterflies continue to irresponsibly flap, giving absolutely no thought to the welfare of their relatives in the Americas.
I’m the same way, and I usually try to share it with my wife, but she never seems as excited about it as I was… “You made me pause my show for that?”
*heh* Yeh, Woody, it pretty much goes that way here, too, except I’m as likely to interrupt my Wonder Woman devouring a book as watching a show.
Nicole, in this case, one of the fun bits was speculating about just who wrote that bit, as the novel it was excerpted from was a collaboration of three writers. From having read all three in their independently-written materials, I am vacillating between two of them in this case.
Nice to find bits like that. 🙂