Susan Hated Literature

Her name is Teresa Ann Gravatt and she is seven years old: She has a mirror through which she can see into another world.

Simple, but gets your attention doesn’t it?

Not everyone knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

Run on sentence or what?

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.

More poetry than prose.

‘Pierre, something’s wrong with the garden,’ said Sophia.
She opened the window and examined the patch of ground. She knew it by heart, every blade of grass. What she saw sent a shiver down her spine.

Bet you’re now wondering what was wrong in the garden.

Thud…
That was the sound the heavy club made as it connected with the head. The body jerked, and slumped back.
And it was done, unheard, unseen: the perfect end, a perfect solution, a perfect story.
But, as the dwarfs say, where there is trouble you will always find a troll.
The troll saw.

A perfect opening

The people who remained in this place have often asked themselves why it was that Ibrahim went mad. I am the only one who knows, but I have always been committed to silence, because he begged me to respect his grief, or, as he also put it, to take pity upon his guilt.

So now you are wondering why Ibrahim went mad. And who this trusted individual is.

Dear Franklin,
I’m unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we’ve been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.

Cute, but there is death there too, so you won’t be expecting sun and light.

They do it with mirrors. It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s also true. Magicians have been using mirrors, usually set at a forty-fice-degree angle, ever since the Victorians began to manufacture reliable, clear mirrors in quantity, well over a hundred years ago.

Gaiman does have a way with opening lines

They said later that he rode into the village on a horse the color of buttermilk, but I saw him walk out of the wood

I just like this one.

On Tuesday, four sheep were killed at Ventebrune in the French Alps. On Thursday, nine were lost at Pierrefort. “It’s the wolves,” a local said. “They’re coming down to eat us all up.”
The other man drained his glass, then raised his hand. “A wolf, Pierrot, my lad. It’s a wolf. A beast such as you have never clapped eyes on before. Coming down, as you say, to eat us all up.”

You gotta watch out for the wolf

All day long, under a yellow and smoking Tuscan sky, the two huge guns vomited fire.

Got my interest so it did.

There was a silence in the book-room, not the silence of intimacy but a silence fraught with tension

tension about what?

The waves are hissing the secrets of winter. They arrive here bearing a wind which has lost no sharpness since it left the west coast of Scotland. The roads are empty and frosted tonight. The moon is timid in a louring sky. The dressing room lights are off. The floodlights have yet to be cranked up. The pitch is fringed with frost. There is nobody here. Why would anyone come?

Setting the scene