King of the Hill

"By the time Nick got back from disposing of our comic collection, we were lying on our stomachs, side by side in front of MTV's Spring Break. I had the novel out and was going through some passages I had high-lighted . . . something I usually never did. As I said, I was a poor, unmotivated student, but Lord of the Flies had excited me, distracted my imagination for a week or so, made me want to live barefoot and naked on an island, with my own tribe of boys to dominate and lead in savage rituals. I read and reread the parts about Jack painting his face, smitten with a desire to smear colored muds on my own face, to be primitive and unknowable and free."

Eric, the gibbous protagonist of the short story "The Cape," in Joe Hill's short story collection 20th Century Ghosts.

The first shady tentacles of Eric's deranged inner character, as a teenager, emerge as he mistakenly snatches his superhero brother's visiting girlfriend, Angie. She, unfortunately, mistakes his sadistic love of demonic Jack and his primitive, oppressive political power in William Golding's Lord of the Flies for a civilizing love of literature. Eric taints his inner, moral sense of true, affectionate Love with the polluted ebb and flow of his own primitive, sado-masochistic urges. Angie later leaves Eric after not only his DUI, or his lazy, pathetic direction in life, but especially after she catches him standing with knife in hand staring at her throat, daydreaming with an obsessive, murderous glare in his eye.

Eric exacts his revenge on Angie, biblically, like the serpent against Eve, in the end, after he re-discovers his cape at home: promising to let her soar high up in the sky with him - like gods, or at least superheroes - but instead letting go of her to plummet to her own death.