Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims’ heads and yanking them out for fun. Mostly he did it with his thick, grubby fingers but sometimes he used tweezers stolen from his mother’s bathroom cabinet.

Slaughter, she thought, is a formal and disciplined word. A processing for victual consumption. The splaying limbs and the horror, the scenes of crimes and battlefields, the flinging of children and catching them on bayonets just out of their mother’s reach, all that is metaphor, simile—the thing, in fact, which is not.

As we heard them go upstairs, Marie’s hand moved on top of my thigh and nudged the edge of my crotch. She blew smoke up toward the paper lampshade. As long as I did not turn toward her, it was fine. I was helping Marie and Lee through a difficult moment in their marriage. 

Somehow, they were swimming in the canals. Later this part seemed hazy, but somehow they were all there: Lila, her little boy, and James, a former student. 

The alley became a river in the rain —a river with currents of clattering cans and a floe of cardboard. The boy would wake to the headlights of lightning spraying the walls of his small room, and lie listening to the single note of drops pinging the metal hood of a blue bulb that glowed above a garage door. Finally, he’d go to the window and look down.

The girl’s scalp looked as though it had been singed by fire—strands of thatchy red hair snaked away from her face, then settled against her skin, pasted there by sweat and sunscreen and the blown grit and dust of travel.

The last time I'd seen my father he behaved like one of those wolf-boys, those kids suckled and reared in the wild by animals, and I was never sure, during the ten confusing minutes I stood on the lawn outside the house,

MY MASTER’S TEMPER were by spasms choleric, the spasms exacerbated by trespass, real or fancied, of his slaves, all of whom had had occasion to beg their fellows daub their backs with salve of rum and lard. 

I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on.

My father was a man who believed history repeated itself. Not in the large ways, of nations and of wars, but in the smaller ways of families. He was a religious man