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Opening Lines
Boy, I've certainly heard some lines from VanderMeer before, but nothing as pathetic as his email saying he needed someone to read all of his published and unpublished/incomplete stories and pull out the most entertaining and sublime first sentences. I hadn't heard from him since my college days when we had an on-again off-again hate-like relationship. No "Hi, how've you been?" No "Long time, no see." Just: "Can you do something for me?" Followed up by a huge package of photocopies in the mail. Pretty typical of VanderMeer in my experience. So instead of sending Garry Nurrish the best stuff - a boring and fruitless task as far as I could tell from reading his stories - I've selected the worst. And, boy, there are some stinkers. So, VanderMeer: thanks for the assignment. Maybe I'll hear from you in another ten years asking to borrow a cup of sugar or something.
Published:
"There are faces and then there are faces."
"The garbage cans wept candy canes, do running down their sides."
"David Pangborn had been walking for a long time, much longer, it seemed, than he should have, though he did not want to think about it too much because thinking about it too much made him realize he had been walking for a long time, much longer, it seemed, than he should have, though he did not want to think about it too much, because thinking about it too much made him realize he had been walking for a long time, much longer, it seemed, than he should have, though he did not want to think about it too much."
" 'Nothing in this world is impossible,' Drake snarled to his accomplice Prospero as he spitted the dead man from butt to mouth with a flagpole."
Unpublished/Incomplete:
"Poor Buckwaldo Mudthumper never saw the giant stalk of asparagus coming at him with a carrot."
"Buckwaldo watched the man watching him; he didn't like all this watching—it made him paranoid, especially since they were in a butcher shop surrounded by dead meat and stuff."
"Lieutenant Snark probed the verdant hills with his eyeballs, which were getting wetter and wetter as the rain trickled down their incline."
"The spike in his forehead did not seem to be getting any better—it was all getting worse and Henry didn't think he could stand being nailed to the wall much longer."
"When MacDonald looked out into his yard and saw the armadillo droppings, something happened to his face, something horrible and terrible, something that would have made a grown man without a heart of stone cry into his banana pudding, if he had had any banana pudding to cry into."
"The thing on the wing of the little buddy-holly-type airplane leered its mouth at him through the fuzzy glass of the airplane's oval window, a window that reflected his fear back at him in the form of a thing leering its mouth at him."
"Crawdaddy Pappy flapped and huffed and puffed and barked and kicked and slapped with his claws but he couldn't get that damn foreigner the sheriff to relinquish his grip on Crawdad Pappy's succulent head; a brain-sucking seemed inevitable."
" 'Monjuubi was a brat, even back at the suppository,' Buckwaldo grimaced."
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