It either strikes you or it doesn’t. You’d think that wouldn’t necessarily be a quality of a good opening paragraph, but turns out not everything that makes this opening paragraph good can be close-read. Merricat Blackwood, her elder sister Constance, and their ailing Uncle Julian live in a large house on extensive grounds, in isolation from the nearby village. Great books are timeless, web browsers are not. Maybe even magic.Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.The literary Internet’s most important stories, every day.Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window),Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window),Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window),Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window),Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window),Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window),Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window),The Editor Who Pulled Joseph Conrad from the Slush Pile.$3.2 million worth of rare stolen books have been found under a house in rural Romania.Let's Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate,Finding Strange Magic and Unlikely Love During the Vietnam War,11 of the Most Anticipated Poetry Collections of Fall/Winter,Miller's Crossing, 30 Years Later: Revisiting the Coen Bros' Gay Irish Gangster Epic,All British People Are Potential Murderers—That's Why We Love Our Mysteries,Craig Johnson on Uniting the Western and the Art Heist Novel,Let's Talk About Sex in Crime Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion. One of my best writing teachers used to ask her class, after finishing a novel, to go back and read the first paragraph for the ways in which it predicted the rest of the text, or in the most skillful cases, taught us to read it. Charles is aware of Merricat's hostility and is increasingly rude to her and impatient of Julian's weaknesses. But it’s not only that she.Next, two lists—who doesn’t love a good list?—of likes and dislikes, much like a child keeping track of her own opinions in her journal. Julian was poisoned with.Merricat and Constance's cousin and Julian's nephew, he is the son of John's and Julian's brother, Arthur.
Charles is aware of Merricat's hostility and is increasingly rude to her and impatient of Julian's weaknesses. While Merricat and Constance shelter for the night under a tree Merricat has made into a hideaway, Constance confesses for the first time that she always knew Merricat poisoned the family. And what a name it is—a somewhat old-fashioned name, Mary Katherine Blackwood, evocative of witch trials and cultists, dense trees in far-away continents and Nancy Drew mysteries (,The real delight, for me, begins in that third sentence, which wiggles beautifully. While carrying out these errands, she is often harassed by the townspeople. Dogs and noise mean townspeople, and the townspeople do not care for the Blackwoods, or at least the Blackwoods who are left.As for her likes: first we get a second pointed mention of Constance in twice as many lines, which should alert us to her importance. Uncle Julian, confined to a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for his memoirs, while Constance cares for him.Through Uncle Julian's ramblings, the events of the past are revealed, including what happened to the remainder of the Blackwood family: six years ago both the Blackwood parents (John and Ellen), an aunt (Julian's wife Dorothy), and a younger brother (Thomas) were murdered – poisoned with,Merricat is protective of her sister and is a practitioner of.Charles quickly befriends Constance, insinuating himself into her confidence. I find it impossible not to go on reading after reaching the end of it, yes, even now, when I am supposed to be writing this close reading for Literary Hub.