Death surrounds me – a massacre of grandparents, fathers and mothers, friends, childhood playmates, aunts, uncles and cousins and pets. They die in car accidents, of heart failure, of cancer, of bad luck and worse luck.
Neighbors
The lot next to his house looked like a dinosaur dig when Eli got home from school that afternoon. Men in yellow uniforms scoured the strata of ash, pulling out copper ribs and ceramic skulls of toilet bowls. A fire truck was parked on his front lawn, muddy water draining into the street. When he first saw the trucks, he thought they must have caught another gang of teenagers sneaking into the abandoned house. Then he smelled the smoke. He saw the sun glaring chartreuse through the clouds and remembered what firemen were really for.
Throw Substance from the Plane – Why Captain Koblic Deserves a Remake
It has often been a thorny issue in cinema – tackling the murky side of human nature and of course its darker episodes. At best, directors, writers and producers run the risk of being so compellingly accurate and explicit in their accounts of horrid histories that critics cry foul with accusations of turning tragedy into entertainment, or of abdicating responsibility to the audience or even using deeply emotive historical events to deliberately manipulate viewer emotions.
The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Doomed City is a classic Russian dystopian novel which was started in the 1960’s but not released until the 1980’s. Writing the novel and then hiding it was a seditious act. Owning the once solitary manuscript copy was to court disaster in the form of the harsh retribution of the state.
Sundowner
The rural hospital where her father languished was brand new, a sparkling edifice improbably situated like some medical temple in a cow pasture. It was such a young building to house the old. Dr. Christine Hartford hurried to locate her dad’s room. She’d been given directions in the social worker’s melodious Outer Banks drawl. Finding Joe would be easier for Christine than accepting his condition.