Iowa...or Maybe it was Utah
Early in the novel, Iowa is situated as one of the settings. The imagery used to describe the state likely won’t get quoted in any tourist brochures, but it gets the point across succinctly:
“This was western Iowa. People from anywhere else, traveling across the state, would have been hard-pressed to see any distinction between its east and its west—or, for that matter, between Ohio and South Dakota. But…Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat.”
Clothes Make the Man
Characterization covers a lot of territory. Much of that territory can be traversed easily through the winding lanes of imagery which offer an author the potential to delineate a character’s physical description as easily as the more abstract qualities. And when it comes to physical description combined with the abstract qualities, clothes can still make the man:
“Wallace had come into the place wearing an overcoat, a garment that Peter had seen only in movies. Probably the only overcoat within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A gentleman’s garment. About him were various other faint traces of white collarness. His red-going-white hair had been slicked back from his sun-mottled forehead, which sported a divot above the left temple where a skin cancer had been rooted out. Reading glasses hung on a gold chain from his neck. His shirt was open at the neck.”
Who Knew This About the Brain?
The brain has been compared to may things. The metaphorical thing of comparison in the simile which appears in this novel may be one of the more unique and certain one of the most eccentric. The imagery which expands upon the assertion makes a pretty strong case, however:
“The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn’t being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord’s private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain.”
Imagery as Imagery
Devin Skraelin is a fiction author within the story and one of his books is being read by another character. Skraelin’s prose offers insight into everything one needs to know about him as an author. Amazing enough, there are some readers who can’t enough of this style of writing (One gets a feeling the creator of Skraelin is one of these readers as this excerpt proceeds to continue on unabated way longer that it needs to.)
“Gnawed to a perilous weakness by the ravening flames, the drawbridge juddered under the footfalls of the massive Kar’doq. Its clenching talons pierced the carbonized wood of the failing timbers like nails driven into cheese. Peering down through a swirling nimbus of smoke, dyed all the lurid hues of Al’kazian silk by the particolored tongues of eldritch fire that lapped all around, its thin lips drew back to expose a silvery rictus of gibbering fangs.”
