December 30th - MeMe

[alexisjane]

30th Dec: astarloa - A scene from a book or film that's stuck with you - for good or for bad.

Oooo, I knew this one straight away : )

Warning - This passage contains the death of a child.

Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the

twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-

fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the

twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.

Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered

carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry,

sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good.

It didn't bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible

nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces

swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on

their own snot.

At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild

blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds's house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he

zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was,

picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black.

The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely

noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-

cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his

weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the

rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty

hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and

dehydration.

No fuss, no muss, no fancy words or clever talk. Just pure unadulterated storytelling that's haunted me for the last 25 years. Just perfect x

Comments

[etoile-etiolee.livejournal.com]

The Stand.
Still haunting me too.

[alexisjane.livejournal.com]

Looking for this made me want to read it again! : ) x

[masja-17.livejournal.com]

Yes, haunting still...

♡

[alexisjane.livejournal.com]

♥ x

[blackrabbit42.livejournal.com]

I think this is in the uncut version, but not the shorter, originally published version, and...

YES.

YES.

YES.

[astarloa.livejournal.com]

Ah, intriguing excerpt!

I think I'm one of the few people in the world who's never read any Stephen King.

[alexisjane.livejournal.com]

I can definitely recommend this one. It's epic, long intricate storylines but then also he doesn't neglect the small stuff like this. But yeah, try the uncut version for sure : )
If you fancy something different though, he does write in different genres, all very King of course but theres YA and fantasy, mystery, all kinds of stuff. But all rooted in believable characters that you never want to let go of.
Well, I like him anyway : ) x

[alexisjane.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the version I have. I can't imagine it without these bits though! All the small stories really made it for me. It's so good! x