‘I guess that’s all there is to tell…’
Chapter 16. It’s the shortest chapter you could ever imagine. And it ends:
‘He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of our great glowing west and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.’
Observe the total lack of punctuation.
(Jesus H. How’d he ever get away with that stuff?)
Not even a comma after ‘whence he had come’? Or a dash?
Man.
Is Jack Schaefer some fuck-you, balls-out writer or what?
About the Author
NICOLA BARKER’S previous books include The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and the novels Wide Open, which won the IMPAC Award, and Behindlings, all available in paperback from Ecco.
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Also by Nicola Barker
Behindlings
The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
Wide Open
Copyright
CLEAR. Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Nicola Barker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-198607-9
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* Sorry to interrupt Solomon’s flow and everything, but when he uses the word ‘Melanic’ he’s referring to the dark skin pigment, melanin, which is found in far greater proportions in those skins of a darker hue–now let’s dive straight back in again, eh?
* I once loaned Solomon a copy of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers where a couple on holiday get drugged, tied up and tortured by an apparently genial pair of bogus holidaymakers. Solomon called the book, ‘morally void. A pointlessly sadistic exercise in controlled, middle-class degeneracy.’
‘But did you like it?’ I asked.
* The Soviet equivalent of Kentucky Fried.