Avoid It Like The Plague
When the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, two thousand students attending Kent State University in Ohio went on the warpath--big time.
--Stephen King, morbidly sandwiching lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" atop a throng of university student protesters moving in mass, hysterical protest just before they are brutally slaughtered by American military soldiers, in The Stand.
posted by Davyth | 4:19 PM
2 Comments:
Oh, King does have a tin-ear doesn't he? His sense of echo is nothing less than dreadful. Had I been his editor, I'd have told him to take out the "like a patient..." just to avoid the cheap, cudgeling effect. Mind you, the main clause needs serious pruning, too.
And people wonder why I cannot bear King....
Then again, King is a pulp writer. Who would expect the average reader to get the allusion, too? Or see bad sentence structure?
The sentence just seems to slump into King's signature colloquial, pulp writing style right after the lines from Eliot's poem.
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