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She wanted to lean back and drink lots of icy Dom Perignon and let happiness consume her, but she could not totally relax. She was always sharply aware of that spectral darkness at the edge of things, that crouching nightmare waiting to spring and devour her. Earl and Emma, her parents, had jammed her into a tiny box of fear, had slammed the heavy lid and locked it; and since then she had looked out at the world from the dark confines of that box. Earl and Emma had instilled in her a quiet but ever-present and unshakable paranoia that stained everything good, everything that should be right and bright and joyful.
From Needful Things by Stephen King
Norris sat behind an old IBM electric typewriter, working on a report with the agonized, breathless concentration only Norris could bring to paperwork. He would stare fixedly at the machine, then abruptly lean forward like a man who has been punched in the belly, and hit the keys in a rattling burst. He remained in his hunched position long enough to read what he had written, then groaned softly. There was a click-rap! click-rap! click-rap! Sound of Norris using the IBM’s CorrecTape to back over some error (he used one CorrecTape per week, on the average), and then Norris would straighten up. There would be a pregnant pause, and then the cycle would repeat itself. After an hour or so of this, Norris would drop the finished report into Sheila’s IN basket. Once or twice a week these reports were even intelligible.
From Rising Sun by Jeffrey Archer
There, by the windows, I saw the familiar figure of Willy Wilhelm, known to everyone as Weasel Wilhelm. Willy’s narrow, ferretlike face was at this moment composed into a mask of smiling attentiveness as he joked with a blond girl sitting before a terminal.
Most organizations had a person like the Weasel: somebody who is more ambitious than scrupulous, somebody who finds a way to make himself useful to the powers that be, while being roundly hated by everyone else. That was the case with Weasel Wilhelm.
Like most dishonest people, the Weasel believed the worst about everybody. He could always be counted on to portray events in their most unflattering light, insisting that anything less was a cover-up. He had a nose for human weakness and a taste for melodrama. He cared nothing for the truth of any situation, and he considered a balanced appraisal weak. As far as the Weasel was concerned, the underlying truth was always strong stuff. And that was what he dealt with.
The other reporters at the Times despised him.
From Sinners by Jackie Collins
He stood and watched the car thread its way slowly back among the traffic. Foolish little girls. Was that really the only reason they went out with him? Did they honestly believe that he could be used to get them into the movies? How many times he had heard it now? How many different ways the direct approach: “Do you think you could get me a screen test?” the oblique hint: “I’ve always wanted to act.” The actress’s approach: “My agent says I’m perfect for the girl’s part in your next film.”
Lorna had warned him, laughed at him, scoffed. “Oh, yes, sure,” she had said, “you’ll have tons of little girls just lining up to jump into bed with you. But ask yourself, my darling, is it you they want? Or is it Charlie Brick?”
From Sinners by Jackie Collins
Charlie had first met her five years previously, when his career as a film actor was jogging along nicely and hers beginning to smoulder.
For the first time in a film, instead of being just a comedy actor, he had been given a romantic interest as well. Women everywhere began to like him. Letters started to pour in, and his career started to zoom. But at the same time it was the beginning of the end as far as Lorna and he were concerned.
The start of his affair with Michelle had changed his life a great deal. In the beginning he just couldn’t believe that a famous actress, probably the most famous European actress of that time, could possibly fancy him. But fancy him she had. Most of the arrangement had been maneuvered by her. She had a husband who conveniently stayed in Paris and appeared only occasionally.
“You are a wonderful man,” she used to purr at him.
No-one had ever said anything like that to him before. He had always felt inadequate, or, at the very most, average. But Michelle had changed all that: she made him feel like a king.
Of course his marriage suffered. He would return home from the studio later and later. At weekends, he would always say he had to work. In the end he hardly ever saw Lorna; they just happened to live under the same roof.
Occasionally they saw each other long enough for a brief exchange of insults. And so I went on, fight after fight, insult after insult, grudge after grudge, until one day things really came to a head.
His career continued to progress in the best possible way. He found himself in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose what films he would do. His notices were always the best. “Charlie Brick Shines Again”, “Brick Saves the Film”, “The Comic Genius of Charlie Brick.”
At last Lorna and he decided to move from their country home. The affair with Michelle had been more or less finished, due to the fact that they were both working in different countries, and meetings became impossible to arrange.
From False Memory by Dean Koontz
[Martie Rhodes has come to collect her friend Susan, who suffers from agoraphobia, to psychiatrist; but as they started, a storm broke out.]
Fat drops of rain – at first in fitful bursts but soon more insistently – began to rattle on the roof that covered the landing. […]
As they reached the bottom of the steps, the rain fell harder than before, rattling through the leaves of the potted plants on the patio, clicking against the bricks.
Susan was reluctant to let go of the corner of the house.
Martie put an arm around her. “Lean on me if you want.”
Susan leaned. “Everything’s so strange out here, not like it used to be.”
“Nothing’s changed. It’s just the storm.”
“It’s a new world,” Susan disagreed. “And not a good one.”
Huddling together, with Martie bending to match Susan’s stoop, they progressed through this new world, now in a rush as Susan was drawn forward by the prospect of the comparatively closed space of the car, but now haltingly as Susan was weighed down and nearly crushed by the infinite emptiness overhead. Whipped by wind and lashed by rain, shielded by their hoods and their billowing coats, they might have been two frightened holy sisters, in full habit, desperately seeking sanctuary in the early moments of Armageddon.
Evidently Martie was affected either by the turbulence of the incoming storm or by her troubled friend, because as they proceeded fitfully along the promenade toward they side street where she had parked her car, she became increasingly aware of a strangeness in the day that was easy to perceive but difficult to define. On the concrete promenade, puddles like black mirrors swarmed with images so shattered by falling rain that their true appearance could not be discerned, yet the disquieted Martie. Trashing palm trees clawed the air with fronds that had darkened from green to green-black, producing a thrum-hiss-rattle that resonated with a primitive and reckless passion deep inside her. On their right, the sand was smooth and pale, like the skin of some vast sleeping beast, and on their left, each house appeared to be filed with a storm of its own, as colourless images of rolling clouds and wind-tossed trees churned across the large ocean-view windows.
Martie was unsettled by all these odd impressions of unnatural menace in the surrounding landscape, but she was more disturbed by a new strangeness within herself, which the storm seemed to conjure. Her heart quickened with an irrational desire to surrender to the sorcerous energy of this wild weather. Suddenly she was afraid of some dark potential she couldn’t define: afraid of losing control of herself, blacking out, and later coming to her senses, thereupon discovering she had done something terrible… something unspeakable. […]
Martie opened the curbside door, helped Susan into the red Saturn, and then went around and got in the driver’s seat.
Rain drummed on the roof, a cold and hollow sound that brought hoofbeats to mind, as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death – were approaching at full gallop along the nearby beach.
REVISION
This section gives you a chance to illustrate your acquired skills of fiction analysis without any help. Here you are to come out with your own interpretation the way you see it.
From Come Together
by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees
The clock display winks over from 08.40 to 08.46. The heating has been running at max for over an hour now, and I can only conclude that Catherine Bradshaw’s ID has been falsified and that rather than being born in Oxford, she was actually born in Bombay. In the summer. In a heatwave. Next to a furnace. At high noon. My iced water cheat has failed. With the summer sun beaming down on the closed windows and the radiators boiling, I might as well be locked in a sauna. Sweat bleeds from my brow. The pillow which props up my head has transformed into a hot-water bottle, the duvet into an electric blanket. Bradshaw, however, is playing it literary and metaphorically cool. Not one groan of discomfort. Not one request for the window to be opened, or water to be brought. Nothing but the regular pattern of her breathing, and the relaxed expression of deep sleep on her face. The ice maiden.
From Man and Boy by Tony Parsons
The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer’s ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.
My father was shot full of morphine and his skin no longer had the colour of living skin and, even with the oxygen mask, his lungs strained and heaved to take in a pitiful amount of air that simply wasn’t enough.
Sometimes the fog in the eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.
‘I love you,” I told him, taking his hands, and saying those words that I had never said to him before.
And I told him because surely it could get no worse than his – but it did get worse, that’s the thing about cancer, it can always exceed your blackest moment.
So the next day I went back to that crowded ward, sat by his bed holding his hand, and – crying harder this time – I told my father again that I loved him.
From Man and Boy by Tony Parsons
A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.
I can remember seeing Pat smile properly for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a Babygro, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us – this big, wide, gummy grin – as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.
And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he were caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable nappy and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.
He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.
But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with star Wars. That was one of the changes which happened when I wasn’t looking.
One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, stormtroopers and light sabres.
If we let him, he would watch the three Star Wars films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him – or rather Gina didn’t let him – so when the television was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of Star Wars figures and grey plastic spaceships, or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light sabre, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.
It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals – or ‘aminals’, as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with subs on his head, parading his cows, sheep and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.
“I’m taking me bath,” he would announce. “I need me aminals.”
Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.
They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat fantasises of brave knights, evil warlords and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he were trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.
From Sinners by Jackie Collins
Charlie asked for the Manager, who appeared almost immediately – a dead ringer for a young George Raft. He appraised Dindi with a flick of his eyes, greeted Charlie profusely, and organized the biggest suite in the hotel. He was no slouch at recognizing celebrities. He was used to dealing with all their peculiar requests. However, it did shake him a bit when Charlie said they wanted to get married right then and there.
“Give me an hour,” he said.
Charlie nodded. It seemed quite reasonable in his present state of mind that a marriage could be arranged at four a.m. in Las Vegas. […]
The preacher was a southern cracker. Hurriedly dressed in a shiny blue suit, he peered at the couple before him and drawled out his vision of the wedding ceremony.
Dindi noticed that his fly was undone and tried to stifle a giggle. She was wearing a pink frilled dress, she looked like a lovely innocent doll.
Charlie also noticed the preacher’s undone fly. The funny old chap had probably been fast asleep! What an accent! This would a great voice to use in some future film.
The manager had arranged the wedding in the penthouse, with the hotel photographer, press-man, two representatives of the local newspaper, with their photographer, presents.
The preacher pronounced them man and wife, belched unobtrusively, and shook Charlie’s hand. Then there was fuss and champagne and photographs and congratulations all around. […]
It was seven a.m. by the time they got back t their suite. Charlie was beginning to feel the strain. His eyes hurt behind his glasses, and the beautiful high he had achieved was beginning to wear off. For the first time he thought about the sanity of what he had just done. He had married a girl he didn’t even know! It was the most ridiculous insane thing. She was very pretty, but he didn’t even know her.
Dindi was dazed. But for different reasons. So suddenly and unexpectedly she was someone. She had married a movie star! […]
Charlie wasn’t sure when he first realized he had made a terrible mistake. Was it the day after his Las Vegas wedding or the day after that?
Viewing things in the cold light of reality, he couldn’t imagine how he could have done it.
Dindi was just as pretty as ever, but an idiot, a pretty little unintelligent idiot. Every time she opened her pouty lips it was to ask for something.
Even after two days it was beginning to drive him mad.
Baby, can I have some money for roulette? Sweetie, can I have those marvelous diamond and turquoise earrings? Honey, what about a little mink to keep off the cold night air?
He … gave her everything she wanted. After all, it was their honeymoon.
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