#it's so funny how many of these are nona considering if you'd asked me which has the best prose i would have said harrow i think
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do you have any favorite quotes or passages from the locked tomb series?
mmm i donât really think about prose in terms of âquotesâ (not trying to sound like a snob i just find it difficult to make value judgments about a piece of writing when itâs isolated from its broader context!) but i think some of my fav bits of prose in the series are:
like, the whole of john 1:20, but especially the creation of alectoââfrom my blood and bone and vomit i conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in, i was terrified youâd find some way to escape before i was done,â âadam and eve, galatea, barbie, frankensteinâs monster with long yellow hair,â âi hid you in me i hid me in youâ etc. just a really really good sequence lmao.
the couple of parts of the john chapters where tm drops the monologuing conceit to have john & harrowlecto do some like rapid-fire dialogue (ââ[...] i couldnât do a damned thingâ / âso what did you doâ / âa damned thing, didnât iâ / âi still love youâ / âyou always say that, harrowharkââ; ââdo you remember what you said to me once i had done it? when we stood here together? / âyesâ / âyou said, i picked you to change and this is how you repay me?â / âwhat else did i say?â / âyou said, what have you done to me? i am a hideousnessâ / âwhat else did i say?â / âwhere did you put the people? where did they go?â / âi still love youâ / âyou said that tooââ) are really good.
the final few pages of nona before the epilogue where alectoâs memories start bleeding through into the present-day action (and the splicing of kiriona killing crux with the entry into the tomb + alectoâs memories of entombment ⌠Screaming and throwing up) have some good turns of phraseââthe scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for itâthe chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen. the teardrop on the hand. the hand that john had fashioned.â; âmost human voices sounded alike, after all. they were not beautiful. the waters parted for her and it became possible to walk, crunching through the bones at the bottom. the bones at the bottom; what did they make her think of?â âthe terrible face with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief. [...] her own edge had been pushed out, her swinging edge, her toy.â walking a VERY fine line between lyrical and overwritten and actually landing it.Â
really fond of varun the eater and nonalectoâs exchangesââgreen thing, green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? where will your body go? what did he do to you to make you this way? [...] they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. i will pull their teeth. i will make it blank for you.â REALLY goes. âwhat did he do to you to make you this wayâ immediately after asking nona if she âlovesâ and nona saying â i donât know what it means, did i ever know what it meant?â and âjohn loves alecto, john needs alectoâ as the thing that forces alectoâs âreturnâ of sorts ⌠every day i get emails
âthe shimmering white figure of the dead kiriona gaiaâ is a very satisfying turn of phrase. i am fond of it
nona epigraph poem (âyou told me sleep, iâll wake you in the morning / i asked what is morning and you said / when everyone who fucked with me is deadâ etc)
some of the language used in gideon to describe canaan house sets off my little fictional house sensibilities so bad. âcastle that had been killed,â âthe look of a picked-at body [...] a beautiful corpse,â âabandoned and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.â horrid horrid house i love her so much.
arm scene, obviously. incidentallyâand this is present throughout harrow but i think i notice it more in scenes like the arm sceneâi really enjoy how much harrow moreso than the other two is written in a voice similar to that of lolita, wherein you have a protagonist with an incredibly affected pretension which the narration pokes fun at them for but which also enables a kind of indulgence in pretension even whilst painting it as such. anywayâ'an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle [...] you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light sheâd sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapulaâ; âprayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did notâ (insane line sorry); âthe lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna.â cowards will call it overwritten but not ME i love sex scenes
& finally, the descriptions of alecto in harrow (which, incidentallyâsomething to be said for the text of harrow referring to alecto predominantly as the Body and the text of nona referring to kiriona pretty heavily as the corpse princeâanyway) but especially the âthat night the body consented to embrace youâ bit spliced in with john bringing up annabel fucking lee for the first time. deranged.
#ask#tlt#nona the ninth spoilers#it's so funny how many of these are nona considering if you'd asked me which has the best prose i would have said harrow i think
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