Food Fight
The imagery found in this story can get a little wild. In fact, it can slither being wild to the downright surreal. The following example gives new meaning to the term food fight and it isn’t even the most bizarre imagery in the book, not by a long shot:
“The towering fruity menace slammed its bananas and its pineapple into the wood of the table, sending food flying. Each blow bruised and smashed the fruit that made it, but the fragrant stuff still held together. Deeba dodged its sweet-smelling blows.”
The Smog
Smog is literally a villainous character in the book. Not just the concept of smog, but Smog as being capable of thought, intent and action. It wasn’t ways this way, of course, and imagery helps to explain the significance of the Smog as threat:
“Yellow-brown and sitting on the city like a stinking dog...That’s what smog is…There were so many chemicals swilling around in it that they reacted together. The gases and liquid vapor and brick dust and bone dust and acids and alkalis, fired through by lightning, heated up and cooled down, tickled by electric wires and stirred up by the wind— they reacted together and made an enormous, diffuse cloud-brain. The smog started to think. And that’s when it became the Smog.”
Ghost Town, Literally
Wraithtown is home to ghosts. But Wraithtown isn’t just a ghost town by virtue of ghosts calling it home. It is literally constructed as a ghostly town:
“Each of the houses, halls, shops, factories, churches, and temples was a core of brick, wood, concrete, or whatever, surrounded by a wispy corona of earlier versions of itself. Every extension that had ever been built and knocked down, every smaller, squatter outline, every different design: all hung on to existence as specters. Their insubstantial, colorless forms shimmered in and out of sight. Every building was cocooned in its older, dead selves.”
The Klinneract
A special type of imagery is often engaged to punctuate the fantasy of the story with the reality of the past. One particularly effective example is a mythic magical weapon known as “the klinneract.” Despite being endowed with magic, however, the weapon proved ineffectual in defeating the Smog. It is not until later in the book that “the klinneract” is revealed to actually be a misappropriation of legislation known as the Clean Air Act.
