Sentenced: Dreaming
"Sentenced" posts were my idea. Once a week we would find an amazing sentence from a book or comic book and then post it here and explain what about what made the sentence tick and why it worked so well in our opinions. It never worked for me. I would either forget to keep track of good sentences I saw, waiting for one great one, or I would find a great paragraph, of which no one sentence itself was great. Maybe I should retitle this to "Paragraphed."
She dreamed nothing. Her mind was clear. As clear as darkness is clear, as emptiness is clear; not even Boyd’s face, or his body (she often dreamed of his chest, of the fine pattern of hair on his stomach) crept into her head to pollute the featureless bliss.
from “Coming to Grief” by Clive Barker. Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories edited by Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward.
The first sentence and the last phrase are the ones that caught my eye. There is something about a great turn of phrase that will get me each and every time. Both of these really good examples of taking something familiar and tweaking it just enough to make it new. The contrasts, between pollute and featureless bliss or between darkness/emptiness and the specifics of her boyfriends body, create so much depth in the images, especially since it is an image of nothing. And then the use of the details about her boyfriend, taking the specific to make it more general, giving details to let everyone know the what the character is thinking (or in this case what she is not thinking) is spot on. Clive Barker has an amazing ability to conjure images that just linger and stick with you for a long time.
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