Fictionary 4/20
Today, we're playing Fictionary with one of my favorite beginnings to any book:
A soft fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jellyfish. The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain and hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street and around the back of the Crow's Nest, through the door and up the cement stairs, down the carpeted hallway and into one of the doors on the left, stretched out on a double bed in room number twenty-seven with a sheet pulled over him, Bobby Shatford lies asleep.
This is, of course, the opening paragraph to a great book that made a terrible, terrible movie:The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger. Buy it (and hey, the DVD if you'd like) at Alibris!
One of my favorite opening paragraphs to a book, ever, has got to be from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas:
ReplyDelete"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, "Holy Jesus!" What are these goddamn animals?"
Say whatever you will about Hunter S. Thompson, but for my money, that paragraph is seared in my memory forever.
"Say whatever you will about Hunter S. Thompson..."
ReplyDeleteWell, first off - agreed, a great opening. And as for HST, I love him...for what he was. My car in high school was a giant red Buick which we all named the red shark, and Fear in Loathing was amazing to us all back then.
As I got older, and actually had a friend (a hot, alcoholic woman) who spent time out in Aspen with HST, I started realizing he was more pathetic than heroic, but a very good writer nonetheless...