The Killing Dance

 

My last two posts covered necromancers in space and Frankenstein's monster, so to round out the Halloween theme, I wanted a vampire book. There are very many choices available. Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series is influential, best-selling, and has reached twenty-seven volumes. This potent sentence starts the sixth book in the series, The Killing Dance. 

There's an intriguing contrast in the first four words. "The most beautiful" anything attracts desire. We compete to spend time with beautiful people and own beautiful art, furnishings, and homes, and to spend time in beautiful locations. On the other hand, we are repelled by corpses. The stench of decay creates an automatic reaction of disgust. We arrange our lives and deaths so that we see as little as possible of corpses. When we do see someone deceased, it is most often in the distanced, ritualized contexts of a hospital or funeral. 

So "the most beautiful corpse" establishes a fast push-pull sensation in a small number of words. 

The next phrase, "I'd ever seen" also accomplishes a lot in a few words. "I" brings in a character, the narrator. "Ever" intensifies the claim of beauty – it is not just the most beautiful of the moment, it is the most beautiful of all time. "I'd ever seen" could raise a question: How many corpses has the narrator seen, and were they attractive? Where some narrators would be slyly suggesting that this is the only corpse they've seen, the informal "I'd" and the short words create a matter-of-fact tone that suggest this is a direct statement instead of an ironic one. It seems likely that the narrator has seen some corpses, and isn't that surprised to see another. 

The final words of the sentence, "was sitting behind my desk," reinforce the even tone by describing an everyday situation in common words. To sit behind a desk is ordinary. There are no descriptive flourishes about what kind of desk, or the way of sitting. The narrator has seen something surprising – a beautiful corpse – and rather than becoming emotional, goes on to talk about common situations in neutral words. 

In short, the narrator keeps their cool when faced with a beautiful corpse, betraying neither attraction nor disgust in the remaining words. 

The beautiful, unexpected person in an office is a situation that begins many private investigator stories. This sentence picks up that heritage, with the even-tempered narrator and the troublesome client ready to start the action. 

There's also one type of corpse that is most known for its beauty: the vampire. To call a vampire "beautiful" is to admit an attraction; to call a vampire a "corpse" is to push it away. We don't yet know, from this sentence alone, that the narrator is facing a vampire. We do know the narrator has mixed feelings. Thus this one sentence starts both an outer conflict, between the narrator and the problem created by the corpse, and an inner conflict within the narrator's own feelings. 

Laurell K. Hamilton has wound up the propulsion of her story in one seemingly simple sentence. This is excellent writing. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert

Frankenstein

I first read Frankenstein around my junior high years. Primed by Frankenstein movies and current horror tales, I expected something gorier. There are deaths in Frankenstein but little splatter. Mary Shelley created an atmosphere of dread, and asked fresh questions about whether we are responsible for our creations. She also gave the monster a chance to talk. 

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818. The sentence is long, as was common at that time. It also features strong, emotionally laden words, a feature of Romantic style, which was dominant in the early 19th century. These are the words that create the strongest emotional response: rejoice, disaster, evil, forebodings. The last three are all negative, which outweighs the lone positive word in the list: rejoice. 

The sentence implies two people, one who is speaking, and "you," one who hears or reads the words. The narrator is reassuring "you" that their evil forebodings have not come true. We have no place, no concrete details – there is nothing here that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. As far as time goes, we only know that an enterprise has commenced. 

"Commenced" means that the enterprise is begun. It does not mean that it has completed. So it is not as reassuring as the narrator hopes to say that "no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise." Will disaster accompany the middle of the enterprise? The completion of it? Also, "disaster" means a huge and enveloping crisis – to say that there has been "no disaster" still leaves open the possibility of many smaller, and still quite serious, problems. 

Both the first and last words of the sentence project the future. The first words, "you will rejoice" are what the narrator expects his later words to accomplish. But as we have seen, the middle words only weakly argue for that outcome. The final words are what "you" projected into the future: "evil forebodings." "You" had a feeling that the enterprise would go badly. "Evil" here can carry two senses. It could intensify the negative strength of the forebodings, or it could mean that the forebodings were themselves a danger. In expressive writing, all the possible meanings can influence how readers feel about the sentence. So both meanings have an effect and both may reflect the author's intentions. 

With only "disaster" avoided, and only at the "commencement," and with "evil forebodings" placed in the strongest position, the sentence creates tension rather than reassurance. The dangerous future still looks more likely than that "you will rejoice."

One other note – this is the kind of sentence that might start a letter. "You will rejoice to hear" fits very well with "when you receive this letter." In fact, the headings in Frankenstein say this is Letter One. When there were fewer novels, to tell a tale in the form of letters may have been a familiar way to approach the writing. The term for book-length fiction written in letters is an "epistolary novel." Dracula also takes this form. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert