How’s this for a good opening? ‘I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.’ If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn’t a novelist, he’s a nutcase. Let’s call him ‘J’. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with.
She said ‘No’. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast.
After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some of her blood, uttered a prayer and torched the house. What makes this testimony so vivid and compelling is the detail: the laundry, the suit, the prayer. A fiction writer might not have had the daring to mingle the commonplace with the heinous quite so casually.
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