Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Obviously I don’t remember exactly what drew me to the book; this was before I knew that attachment to a book was something that required an explanation. But I think I sensed something agreeably weird and different in it. Other stories expected the reader to passively identify with a brave hero, who contended with some form of monster. I loved a lot of those stories; I was obsessed with Star Wars. But here was a story that asked the reader to actively oppose a cowardly hero, to drag the character against his will into conflict with a monster that turns out to be himself. Like most children’s stories, it builds up a child’s sense of personal power (“Did you know that you are very strong?”), but in a dark way that makes it difficult to avoid acknowledging, on some pre-verbal or at least pre-analytical level, the basic sadism of reading.
When we say that drama is about conflict, we mean, in part, that readers want terrible things to befall the people we read about; if they don’t, we rightly complain that nothing is happening, and only then do we do what Grover has asked us to do, and stop turning the pages. I liked that The Monster at the End of the Book treated me as grown-up enough to let me in on that.

The Story of Mary MacLane was an instant best seller. Some eighty thousand copies were sold the first month alone, and the resulting $17,000 in royalties allowed MacLane to fulfill her greatest ambition: to escape Butte. The book went through several printings, and its author remained front-page news for years. Mary MacLane Societies were organized by young women all over the country. The popular vaudeville team of Weber and Fields—remembered today mostly as the introducers of pie-in-the-face gags—did a burlesque of the book. A full-length spoof was published, titled The Story of Willie Complain. “Montana’s lit’ry lady” found her way into the comics and popular songs. There was even a Mary MacLane Highball, “with or without ice-cream, cooling, refreshing, invigorating, devilish, the up-to-date drink.”

Smoke over Sydney. For days, we can’t see the sky, just a thick pall over everything. The light is orange, almost vermillion, and everything it touches – the plants in my garden, the stack of books beside my balcony door – takes on an otherworldly glow. The sun looks like a ball of fire; blood red one day, hot pink the next. Burnt leaves blow onto the footpath from kilometres away.
One news site says it’s the equivalent of smoking thirty cigarettes each day. One reports of collapsed lungs, bronchitis; another of asthma outbreaks in people who’ve been symptom-free for years. My eyes sting. I’m sent automated SMS warnings from my university, my GP, my gym. The newspapers keep talking about our physical health, but none of them are mentioning what is happening to us mentally.