Recently I read this book and liked it a lot. Then, last night, I watched the movie (the Swedish version) because I wanted to see how they’d translate it onto the screen, since so much of the book was about mood, and the effects were so subtle and delicate. In a few days I’m going [...]
So anyone who actually reads this site might be wondering what it was that just happened. In Aristotelian philosophy we might discuss the variety of kinds of causes that caused this story, but honestly I can never remember all of them. So let’s just say the less interesting reason was to just write something, to [...]
On the drive home nobody talked for a long time, maybe two hours, not a peep. Ted was still in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the moonlit countryside; and Elan and William were motionless in back, quiet as children looking to divert a beating with good behavior. Part of Harv was preoccupied, [...]
Some uncertain number of hours later five of them came out: Stoney, one of the Russian chicks, some guy Harv didn’t know, Ted, and Elan. Stoney was going on about something, gesturing grandly across the plains as if the whole vast expanse belonged to him somehow, or would soon; then he gestured at the sky, [...]
Pam’s turned out to be the bar he’d been in the night when he met Tenna and the Giant — Laramie — and this time it was full, with both halves of the bar almost completely occupied. Harv knew he was seeing the world through an angry fog, and knew that every thought he’d have [...]
Harv’s job was basically done: he re-checked lines of sight and mechanical fitness of the defenseworks, which he’d done a number of times already. For turrets with guns he made sure they could pivot and swivel throughout the full range of motion, and that they were restricted such that they couldn’t shoot into the walls [...]
On what was to have been the last day Stoney came to the site early, in the company of two women who could have been his daughters but obviously weren’t — both tallish and blond, sexy and the right kind of haggard, like Russian party girls who’d lost their A-list status and signed onto less [...]
They were maybe two days away from finishing Stoney’s bunker, and Harv was infused with the usual combination of satisfaction and unease. The satisfaction owed to having brought something into existence: once all you could see at this site was nothing interrupted by tumbleweed; and now a concrete dome arched from the plains dirt, speckled [...]