Book extracts
On this page are featured some extracts from various novels that have lingered in my memory; most were read during my late childhood and early adolescence.
Stephen King
I read many of Stephen King’s novels as a teenager, in the 1980s (but not his later output). These two were the first horror novels I read, when I was 13 or so (admittedly without my parents’ approval!), and Firestarter is my favorite of all his novels – I do wish he would write a sequel as I would like to see what happened to Charlie when she grew up! I daydreamed of having these girls’ psionic powers, to use on classmates who were unpleasant to me! He has a talent for writing memorable phrases, some of which are in the extracts below.
Firestarter
“I am talking about the potential for destruction. I am talking about a talent which is linked to the pituitary gland, a gland which is nearly dormant in a child Charlene McGee’s age. What happens when she becomes an adolescent and that gland awakes from its sleep and becomes for twenty months the most powerful force in the human body, ordering everything from the sudden maturation of the primary and secondary sex characteristics to an increased production of visual purple in the eye? Suppose you have a child capable of eventually creating a nuclear explosion simply by the force of her will?
“That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Is it? Then let me progress from insanity to utter lunacy, Captain Hollister. Suppose there is a little girl out there someplace this morning who has within her, lying dormant only for the time being, the power to someday crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery?”
Other than shoes, John Rainbird was interested in only two things. One of them was death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for this inevitability for twenty years or more. Dealing death had always been his business and was the only trade he had ever excelled at. He became more and more interested in it as he grew older, as an artist will become more interested in the qualities and levels of light, as writers will feel for character and nuance like blindmen reading braille. What interested him most was the actual leaving … the actual exhalation of the soul … the exit from the body and what human beings knew as life and the passing into something else. What must it be like to feel yourself slipping away? Did you think it was a dream from which you would wake? Was the Christian devil there with his fork, ready to jam it through your shrieking soul and carry it down to hell like a piece of meat on a shish kebab? Was there joy? Did you know you were going? What is it that the eyes of the dying see?
Rainbird hoped he would have the opportunity to find out for himself. In his business, death was often quick and unexpected, something that happened in the flick of an eye. He hoped that when his own death came, he would have time to prepare and feel everything. More and more lately he had watched the faces of the people he killed, trying to see the secret in the eyes.
Death interested him.
Dr. Wanless struggled briskly for forty seconds, and then his efforts to save himself began to flag. His hands beat lightly at the twisted granite that was John Rainbird’s face. His heels drummed a muffled retreat tattoo on the carpeting. He began to drool against Rainbird’s callused palm.
This was the moment.
Rainbird leaned forward and studied Wanless’s eyes with a childlike eagerness.
But it was the same, always the same. The eyes seemed to lose their fear and fill instead with a great puzzlement. Not wonder, not dawning comprehension or realization or awe, just puzzlement. For a moment those two puzzled eyes fixed on John Rainbird’s one, and Rainbird knew he was being seen. Fuzzily, perhaps, fading back and back as the doctor went out and out, but he was being seen. Then there was nothing but glaze. Dr. Joseph Wanless was no longer staying at the Mayflower Hotel; Rainbird was sitting on this bed with a life-size doll.
“Hockstetter says that the place where that tray hit the wall was rippled. It was sheet steel, but it rippled with the heat. The tray itself was twisted entirely out of shape. She smelted it. That little girl might have put out three thousand degrees of heat for a split second there.” He looked at Rainbird, but Rainbird was looking vaguely around the living room, as if he had lost interest. “What I’m saying is that what you plan to do is dangerous for all of us, not just for you.”
“Oh yes,” Rainbird agreed complacently. “There’s a risk. Maybe we won’t have to do it. Maybe Hockstetter will have what he needs before it becomes necessary to implement … uh, plan B.”
“Hockstetter’s a type,” Cap said curtly. “He’s an information junkie. He’ll never have enough. He could test her for two years and still scream we were too hasty when we … when we took her away. You know it and I know it, so let’s not play games.”
“We’ll know when it’s time,” Rainbird said. I’ll know.
“And then what will happen?”
“John the friendly orderly will come in,” Rainbird said, smiling a little. “He will greet her, and talk to her, and make her smile. John the friendly orderly will make her feel happy because he’s the only one who can. And when John feels she is at the moment of greatest happiness, he will strike her across the bridge of the nose, breaking it explosively and driving bone fragments into her brain. It will be quick … and I will be looking into her face when it happens.”
All metabolic telemetry is within normal parameters – nothing strange or out of place. It’s as if she was reading a good book or writing a class theme instead of creating what you say must have been upwards of 30,000 degrees of spot heat. To my mind the most fascinating (and frustrating!) information of all is the Beal-Searles CAT test. Next to no caloric burn! In case you’ve forgotten your physics – occupational hazard with you shrinks – a calorie is nothing but a unit of heat; the amount of heat necessary to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade, to be exact. She burned maybe 25 calories during that little exhibition, what we would burn doing half a dozen sit-ups or walking twice around the building. But calories measure heat, damn it, heat, and what she’s producing is heat … or is she? Is it coming from her or through her? And if it’s the latter, where is it coming from? Figure that one out and you’ve got the Nobel Prize in your hip pocket! I’ll tell you this: if our test series is as limited as you say it is, I’m positive we’ll never find out.
Last word: Are you sure you want to continue these tests? Lately I just have to think about that kid and I start to get very antsy. I start thinking about things like pulsars and neutrinos and black holes and Christ knows what else. There are forces loose in this universe that we don’t even know about yet, and some we can observe only at a remove of millions of light-years … and breathe a sigh of relief because of it. The last time I looked at that film I began to think of the girl as a crack – a chink, if you like – in the very smelter of creation. I know how that sounds, but I feel I would be remiss not to say it. God forgive me for saying this, with three lovely girls of my own, but I personally will breathe a sigh of relief when she’s been neutralized.
If she can produce 30,000 degrees of spot heat without even trying, have you ever thought what might happen if she really set her mind to it?
She thought dimly of her father again, and fresh grief sliced into her: dead; he was dead; the thought seemed to diffuse the power still more, and now, at last, the hissing noise began to fade. The steam rolled majestically past her. Overhead, the sun was a tarnished silver coin.
I changed the sun, she thought disjointedly, and then, No – not really – it’s the steam – the fog – it’ll blow away –
But with a sudden sureness that came from deep inside she knew that she could change the sun if she wanted to … in time.
The power was still growing.
This act of destruction, this apocalypse, had only approached its current limit.
The potential had hardly been tapped.
Carrie
She walked over to where Carrie lay on her side, unable to hear her own footsteps under the hungry crackle of the fire. She looked down at the curled-up figure with a bemused and bitter pity. The knife hilt protruded cruelly from her shoulder, and she was lying in a small pool of blood – some of it was trickling from her mouth. She looked as if she had been trying to turn herself over when unconsciousness had taken her. Able to start fires, pull down electric cables, able to kill almost by thought alone; lying here unable to turn herself over.
Sue knelt, took her by one arm and the unhurt shoulder, and gently turned her on to her back.
Carrie moaned thickly, and her eyes fluttered. The perception of her in Sue’s mind sharpened, as if a mental picture was coming into focus.
(who’s there)
And Sue, without thought, spoke in the same fashion:
(me sue snell)
Only there was no need to think of her name. The thought of herself as herself was neither words nor pictures. The realization suddenly brought everything up close, made it real, and compassion for Carrie broke through the dullness of her shock.
And Carrie with faraway, dumb reproach:
(you tricked me you all tricked me)
(carrie i don’t even know what happened is tommy)
(you tricked me that happened trick trick trick o dirty trick)
The mixture of image and emotion was staggering, indescribable. Blood. Sadness. Fear. The latest dirty trick in a long series of dirty tricks: they flashed by in a dizzying shuffle that made Sue’s mind reel helplessly, hopelessly. They shared the awful totality of perfect knowledge.
(carrie don’t don’t don’t hurts me)
Now girls throwing sanitary napkins, chanting, laughing, Sue’s face mirrored in her own mind: ugly, caricatured all mouth, cruelly beautiful.
(see the dirty tricks see my whole life one long dirty trick)
(look carrie look inside me)
And Carrie looked.
The sensation was terrifying. Her mind and nervous system had become a library. Someone in desperate need ran through her, fingers trailing lightly over shelves of books, lifting some out, scanning them, putting them back, letting some fall, leaving the pages to flutter wildly
(glimpses that’s me as a kid hate him daddy o mommy wide lips o teeth bobby pushed me o my knee car want to ride in the car we’re going to see aunt cecily mommy come quick i made pee)
in the wind of memory; and still on and on, finally reaching a shelf marked TOMMY, subheaded PROM. Books thrown open, flashes of experience, marginal notations in all the hiergglyphs of emotion, more complex than the Rosetta Stone.
Looking. Finding more than Sue herself had suspected – love for Tommy, jealousy, selfishness, a need to subjugate him to her will on the matter of taking Carrie, disgust for Carrie herself,
(she could take better care of herself she does look just like a GODDAM TOAD)
hate for Miss Desjardin, hate for herself.
But no ill will for Carrie personally, no plan to get her in front of everyone and undo her.
The feverish feeling of being raped in her most secret corridors began to fade. She felt Carrie pulling back, weak and exhausted.
(why didn’t you just leave me alone)
(carrie i)
(momma would be alive i killed my momma i want her o it hurts my chest my shoulder o o o i want my momma)
(carrie i)
And there was no way to finish that thought, nothing there to complete it with. Sue was suddenly overwhelmed with terror, the worse because she could put no name to it: The bleeding freak on this oil-stained asphalt suddenly seemed meaningless and awful in its pain and dying.
(o momma i’m scared momma MOMMA)
Sue tried to pull away, to disengage her mind, to allow Carrie at least the privacy of her dying, and was unable to. She felt that she was dying herself and did not want to see this preview of her own eventual end.
(carrie let me GO)
(Momma Momma Momma oooooooooooo OOOOOOO)
The mental scream reached a flaring, unbelievable crescendo and then suddenly faded. For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed.
(she’s dying o my god i’m feeling her die)
And then the fight was gone, and the last conscious thought had been
(momma i’m sorry where)
and it broke up and Sue was tuned in only on the blank, idiot frequency of the physical nerve endings that would take hours to die.
She stumbled away from it, holding her arms out in front of her like a blind woman, toward the edge of the parking lot. She tripped over the knee-high guard rail and tumbled down the embankment. She got to her feet and stumbled into the field, which was filling with mystic white pockets of ground mist. Crickets chirruped mindlessly and a whippoorwill
(whippoorwill somebody’s dying)
called in the great stillness of morning.
She began to run, breathing deep in her chest, running from Tommy, from the fires and explosions, from Carrie, but mostly from the final horror – that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.
Mary O’Hara
Like many pre-teenage girls I went through a horse-mad phase and read every horse novel I could find. My favorite book series included The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell, the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley and the three novels by Mary O’Hara: My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming. The wild stallions who starred in these (I was uninterested in the humans!) seemed more like ferocious mythological creatures than real horses. A memorable horse from the O’Hara series was a wild white stallion called the Albino; he only appeared briefly but left a lasting impression. The extracts below from Thunderhead feature him.
Chapter 13
On the summit of a nearby hill stood a great white stallion.
He was upwind from his mares, which was fortunate for the Goblin. As it was, the Albino noticed the commotion in his harem and lifted his head to observe it.
This animal stood sixteen and a half hands high. He was pure white. His body had power and strength rather than gracefulness. He was not smooth. He was gnarled like an old oak tree. His coat was marred by many scars. His great age showed in the hollows of his flanks and shoulders and face. Behind the dark glare of his eye, a blazing fire burned and on this flame was projected an irresistible will-power, and a personality that was like the core of a hurricane.
He looked over his kingdom. He had stood there for years, looking over his kingdom. And – if horses think – wondering who would take over when his end came. He had no heir. How could he have? He permitted no colt older than a year to remain in the band of mares, nor any stallion older than a two-year-old to be in the valley. Here and there, in the deep grass, were the polished bones of those who had challenged him. And if any attempted to return after he had driven them forth – they did not try a second time.
When Goblin caught the unmistakable strong scent of the stallion he trotted out from the herd to find him. He saw him up there on a hill – just where Banner would have been – and with a joyful nicker, started toward him.
The Albino came down to meet him.
Goblin, a creature of fire and magnetism himself, felt the oncoming stallion in terms of voltage, and it was almost too much to be borne. Goblin came to a stop. It occurred to him that he was going in the wrong direction. But he held his ground.
He watched. He had never seen or felt anything like that before. The stallion was so contained, his power was so gathered and held within him that he was all curves. His great neck was so arched that his chin was drawn in and under, the crest of his head was high and rounded with long ears cocked like spear-points. His face was terrifying – that ferocious expression! Those fiery eyes! And his huge, heavily-muscled legs curving high, flung forward so that the great body floated through the air – then the massive hoofs striking and bounding up from the earth with sledge-hammer blows that made the hills tremble and echoed like thunder in the valley!
The Goblin still held his ground. The Albino slowed his pace, came closer – stopped. Their noses were about two feet apart.
For as long as a minute they faced and eyed each other.
They were the same. Trunk and branch of the same tree. And from that confusing identity – each seeing himself as in a distorted mirror – there flamed terror and fury.
No self-respecting stallion would deign to attack a mere yearling, or even to take him seriously enough to administer heavy punishment. But suddenly the Albino raised his right hoof and gave one terrible pawing stroke accompanied by a short grunting screech of unearthly fury. And in so doing, he both acknowledged and attempted to destroy his heir.
The stroke was delivered with lightning speed. From his great height, if the blow had come down on Goblin’s head, as was intended, it would have killed him instantly.
But Goblin was endowed with the same speed, and reflexes that acted quicker than thought. He swerved. The great hoof glanced down his neck, ripping the flesh at the shoulder, and sent him rolling.
To complete the attack, the stallion dropped nose to earth, turned and lashed with hind feet to catch the body of the colt as he fell from the blow and finish him off.
But the Goblin rolled too far and too fast, landed on his feet, and whirled to face his antagonist.
The stallion plunged toward him – head stretched out like a lethal missile, the twisted mouth open and reaching to bite – the great teeth, like slabs of yellow stone – bared – and in the wild and terrible face, two eyes blazing like fire-opals.
The Goblin whirled and streaked toward the band of mares. They were bunched, watching, fascinated. They opened their ranks and let him in.
They scattered at the impact of the Albino’s head-on rush. Goblin dodged. He felt the rake of the Albino’s teeth down his haunch – a chunk bitten out – he squealed and doubled behind another mare. The Albino’s charge knocked her off her feet and Goblin went down under her. He felt a burning pain in his ear and tore it loose. He was up again, shouldering into a group of mares and foals. When he came out the other side, the Albino had lost him for the moment. It was his chance. He fled toward the keyhole in the rampart, the Albino in thundering pursuit. Entering the passageway, the Goblin followed the zigzag path which led through it, and here his smaller size gave him an advantage. Emerging on the other side, the Albino was some distance behind, but still coming fast.
It was a long chase.
Goblin’s youth and his quickness at dodging and doubling – and the cover given to him by the rocks and clumps of trees – saved him. Six miles down the river, he was alone at last, as the afternoon light began to fade. He was limping from the painful wound in his shoulder. He carried his head on one side, favoring the torn ear, now and then giving it a little shake to shake the pain away, scattering drops of blood. He ached all over. To move, now that he had stopped running, was an agony. He stood under a tree, twisted and quivering. He ate nothing all night.
In the morning he went to the river and drank deeply.
The memory of all that had happened was graven in him. He faced the rampart, cocked his one good ear, turned his head until he caught the wind, and stood straining, listening, smelling, bringing to his consciousness – almost as strongly as if he could see him – the terrible monster that had terrified and bested him. He had the impulse to neigh and challenge him – but not the strength nor the courage. Never mind – there would be another day. Wait. He had wounds to heal.
Goblin grazed until he had filled his belly and renewed his strength, then took the way home.
Chapter 21
So Thunderhead was not gelded.
A year before, the Albino had recognized in Thunderhead a reflection of himself in miniature. But gelding would have changed that. It would have left the colt, perhaps, a successful racer; it would have made him more useful to men and amenable to their demands; but never again would he have been a creature who could have commanded the notice of his royal great-grandfather.
Chapter 37
But Ken’s agonized eyes found what they were looking for. The Albino, and his instant alert as Thunderhead entered the valley! The two stallions saw each other at the same moment. The Albino rushed forward as if for immediate attack, then turned and began to round up the far flung band of mares and colts behind him. At a swift twisting gallop he circled them, gathered them all in and bunched them in an invisible corral. All his actions were strained and nervous.
But Thunderhead moved with exuberance and calm. His muscles flowed smoothly under his satin coat as he leisurely circled his little band of stolen mares, bunched and froze them, then trotted out in front.
The two stallions faced each other about a hundred yards apart, motionless as statues. The Albino moved forward a little, then stopped. He did this again. Thunderhead stood without a quiver, his head high, his weight forward, his hind legs stretched back.
Ken suddenly thrust the nose-bag into Howard’s hands. “Hold that! They’re gonna fight! I’ve got to get him!”
He ran to Thunderhead, calling his name. Thunderhead did not even twitch an ear in his direction. He was watching the Albino with a minute, comprehensive stare that penetrated the body and timed the nerve-fuses.
Ken seized the dangling halter rope and flung his weight on it. “Come away! Come away, Thunderhead!”
He hauled with all his power, trying to break the stallion’s fixation, but he might as well have tried to move a rock. The stallion stared over him, immobile.
The boy burst out crying and struck at the stallion’s head, jerking to and fro with all his weight. “Oh, stop it, Thunderhead! Please, Thunderhead! Come away!”
Howard dropped the nose-bag, rushed to his brother’s side and seized the halter.
Ken’s voice reached Thunderhead dimly but he made no response. This was his world, his inheritance. Ken had no part in it. But how to become master of it? Only by the destruction of that which barred his way.
Rearing backward, he shook loose, knocking Howard down and snapping Ken aside with a whip-lash of his head. Then, screaming his challenge, he hurtled forward as from a spring-board.
At the same instant the Albino rushed to meet him and both animals stopped short about thirty feet apart and stood tensely eyeing each other. These were two antagonists who had met before and had not forgotten the event.
Mingled with Thunderhead’s desire to annihilate this obstacle before him was the satisfaction of an intense curiosity. Here at last was the great being who had overshadowed his whole life, the image of whom had hung in his blood as persistently and as challengingly as the snow-scent hung in the mountain wind.
But the Albino was confused. His feet shifted nervously as if taking firmer hold of the earth. His reaching nostrils expanded and contracted slowly. In his sunken eye-sockets his white-ringed eyes stared and meditated, seeing there before him, HIMSELF! His own superb and invincible youth! He was there! He was here! But the strength was as one. It flowed like a current between them as if it were already creating a third horse that appeared in a misty globe between them, and in which they were both fused.
Power and fire and glory rushed through the old stallion and he trumpeted with ecstasy at this transmutation of himself into the shining magnificence of that vision.
He rushed forward. One will seemed to animate them both, for Thunderhead charged too, each flinging bared teeth at the other’s back in passing.
The Albino drew first blood. A red stain sprang out on Thunderhead’s withers and spread slowly down his shoulder.
As they passed, they whirled and reared to strike at each other with their front hoofs, reaching over the neck to land body blows that resounded like great bass drums. Short snarling grunts were jarred from them.
The Albino reached under and seized Thunderhead’s throat, trying to pull back and tear out the jugular vein. But Thunderhead locked his forelegs around the Albino’s neck and pressed close into those grinding jaws.
The horses staggered like wrestlers, Thunderhead forcing the Albino backwards. Then he loosed the grip of his forelegs and began to use them for attack, flailing with his hoofs on the back of the Albino, raking the flesh from the bones and striving to land a crippling blow on the kidneys.
For an instant the massive jaws crunching down on Thunderhead’s jugular vein relaxed, he tore loose, both horses wheeled, plunged away, then whirled to eye each other again and to get their wind and their balance for the next charge.
There was a jagged bleeding gash in Thunderhead’s throat. The Albino was laced with pulsing crimson streams. The unnatural expansion of his nostrils showed the beginning of exhaustion.
Again, as if animated by a single will, the stallions charged each other with high heads and stiff, lifted tails. Meeting, rising, swerving, sinking with indescribable coiling grace – not one motion lost – they turned their heads sideways with bared reaching teeth and thrust them forwards and under to seize the foreleg.
Each blocked this maneuver cleverly; they braced themselves against each other with locked, straining necks, and swung back first one and then the other foreleg out of reach of the darting, snake-like heads. But Thunderhead was as quick as a rattler. His muzzle thrust in and caught the lower leg of the Albino before he could withdraw it and fractured the bone with a single twisting crunch of the jaws.
The Albino gave no sign. The moment Thunderhead loosed his hold, the older horse rose to his full height. One foreleg dangled useless, but he still had that mighty right hoof with which he had nearly killed the colt two years ago. The same blow would do it now.
Thunderhead too was on his hind legs, feinting as if to strike. But he saw the blow coming. In mid-air he whirled, dropped his head and lashed out with his heels.
As the Albino came down with his killing stroke, his face received the full impact of those terrible hoofs, and both cheeks were ripped up so that the skeleton of his head was bared.
The Albino’s one good foreleg hit the earth with a crashing jar. Thrown off balance by failure to land his blow, and the murderous kick, he sank to his knees. Before he could recover, Thunderhead had spun around. His right hoof shot out in one pawing stroke which crushed the bony structure of the old stallion’s head and sliced off the lower part of his face.
Blood spouted from the fatal wound, mingled with the choking and bubbling breath. The Albino’s eyes closed and his body sank into the earth, his head moving slowly from side to side in agony.
Thunderhead stood over him. The Albino’s eyes opened once and looked up at Thunderhead. There was the vision. The shining phantom horse – oversoul of the line! To this prince of the royal blood he now bequeathed all his wisdom. He gave him knowledge of the voices of the trees and waters and the great snows and winds, so that nothing in the valley would be strange to him, no, not a single mare, nor the smallest colt nor a hummingbird nor eagle nor a blade of grass.
Thunderhead’s right hoof rose and fell with lightning speed, cleaving the skull.
The Albino quivered and was still. Then one deep sigh came from him, and on it there ebbed away his life, while his blood and brains pumped slowly out to mingle with the earth of his beloved valley.
Thunderhead lifted his mighty crest and made the mountains ring with his unearthly screech of triumph.
Chapter 39
“Ah! They’ll pick his bones! A true burial of the plains!” Rob’s face lit up. “A great old boy! I’ve always had a corner in my heart for him, even if he did nearly brain me!”
Ken had forgotten this. His father showed him again the scar over his temple where the Albino’s hoof had left its mark and it seemed to draw them all into a close little knot.
“What a great horse!” said Rob leaning back again. “Ken, there are outstanding individuals in the animal world as well as the human. The Albino was like Napoleon! or like Caesar! To be close to one of those is like being close to a charge of T.N.T.”
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