In previous iterations of this type of post, I painstakingly tried to separate prose into metaphors, similes, and descriptions. However, what I realized is that there are many comparisons that don’t fit into these neat little boxes, and people will often disagree on the differences between them. And what does splitting hairs really accomplish? What I really want to do is showcase some of the best prose I have encountered while reading.
Let’s celebrate some excellent prose!
prose
She cocked a sardonic eye at him, and for a moment he could see Detta Walker in there. It was like hazy sunlight winking off a bar of steel.
He felt tension worming sharp little fingers under his skin now, and he supposed Cort had felt much the same at times like this under his gruff, bluff exterior.
Wasn’t that what a gunslinger was, when you stripped off the few stern lines of ritual and stilled the few iron grace-notes of catechism? Wasn’t he (or she) only a human hawk, trained to bite on command?
This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice.
“Damn it, I’m not a gunslinger!”
He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler.
It reached high with one paw and slashed forward, meaning to knock Eddie loose like a pinecone.
It lay as it had lain, at the foot of the tree Eddie had climbed, a fallen Colossus with its legs apart and its knees in the air, like a furry female giant who had died trying to give birth.
Behind them, the setting sun was radiating spokes of sullen red light across the jumbled ground they had just crossed, turning the fallen trees into crisscrossing black shapes like Chinese ideograms.
Roland bent, picked Susannah up, and began to brush her off. He did this with a kind of impartial affection, like a mother brushing off her toddler after she has taken one of her necessary tumbles in the dust of the back yard.
“That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can’t be because there isn’t any such thing as the boogeyman, not really.
The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn’t there a rough undertone to the sound? A kind of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart?
He tried to imagine a world where true north was slipping slyly off to the east or west and gave up almost at once. It made him feel a little ill, the way looking down from the top of a high building had always made him feel a little ill.
Jake was perfectly aware that in the fierce furnace of Elmer Chambers’s mind, the gross carbon of wish and opinion was often blasted into the hard diamonds which he called facts . . . or, in more informal circumstances, “factoids.” His favorite phrase, spoken often and with reverence, was The fact is, and he used it every chance he got.
He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat.
Ms. Franks began to ring the Assembly Bell. Each peal stabbed into Jake’s ears and then seemed to flash across his brain like a small rocket.
The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking.
“Thought I might, you know, carve something.” He paused, then added: “I’m not very good, though.” He sounded as if he might be trying to reassure her of this fact.
Her expression—a little haughty, a little naughty—suggested that she expected Roland to be exasperated with her, perhaps even angry.
Now that she saw he wasn’t going to explode at her as he sometimes did when she was slow or fractious (or at least not yet), her eyes again took on the mocking sun-on-steel glint he associated with Detta Walker.
His way was to act—to quickly consult his own interior, utterly mysterious workings, and then act. Of them all, he had been the most perfectly made, a man whose deeply romantic core was encased in a brutally simple box which consisted of instinct and pragmatism.
The gunslinger looked up into the starry sky, his brow creased in deep thought. Then an amazingly sunny smile broke across his features and he recited...
There was a thick cough from the fire.
As he stood looking in, someone else he knew came around the corner. It was Jack Andolini, wearing a three-piece suit the color of vanilla ice cream and carrying a black cane in his left hand.
Every now and then the device which followed the snake—a steel block that walked on stubby mechanical legs—would catch up with it and give the snake a nudge, as if telling it to hurry the fuck up.
“Take it, Roland!” he shouted desperately, but when he snatched a quick look around he saw that Roland was still standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his expression serene and distant. He might have been thinking of chess problems or old love-letters.
Then his chest hitched and he loosed the boy’s name in a long, bloodcurdling cry. In the woods behind them, some large bird flew away in a dry whirr of wings toward some less exciting part of the world.
The posture of his body said he was prepared to stand that way all day, if that was what it took.
“Okay? Now that the numb-fuck apprentices have the guns and the master’s unarmed, can we please go? If something big comes out of the bush at us, Roland, you can always throw your knife at it.”
“Oh, that,” he murmured. “I almost forgot.” He took the knife from his purse and held it out, hilt first, to Eddie.
“This is ridiculous!” Eddie shouted.
And above the three of them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage.
The Piper School, his father had explained to him the summer before (the Bicentennial Summer, that had been—all bunting and flags and New York Harbor filled with Tall Ships), was, quite simply, The Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy Your Age.
He told them that the school was depending on them, he was depending on them, and their parents were depending on them. He did not tell them that the entire free world was depending on them, but he strongly implied that this might be so.
That last was somehow the worst; that persistent feeling that his whole life had turned into a funhouse mirror-maze.
Would they actually send him away to the nuthatch if it started to seem that his elevator no longer went all the way to the top floor?
“I’d like to step out for a moment, if I may,” Jake said.
This was another example of Piper-speak. Piper students did not ever have to “take a leak” or “tap a kidney” or, God forbid, “drop a load.” The unspoken assumption was that Piper students were too perfect to create waste byproducts in their tastefully silent glides through life. Once in a while someone requested permission to “step out for a moment,” and that was all.
He came to a door marked GIRLS. He pushed it open, expecting to see a bright desert sky and a blue haze of mountains on the horizon. Instead he saw Belinda Stevens standing at one of the sinks, looking into the mirror above the basin and squeezing a pimple on her forehead. Jesus Christ, do you mind?” she asked. “Sorry. Wrong door. I thought it was the desert.” “What?”
Three urinals gleamed spotlessly under the fluorescent lights. A tap dripped solemnly into a sink. That was all.
Waves of faintness rushed through him and turned his thoughts to billowing parachute silk.
“Moses in the bullrushes!” she gasped, fluttering a hand rapidly against the front of her housedress. “You scared the bejabbers out of me, Johnny!”
He threw back the covers, suddenly knowing that the door beside his bookcase no longer led into the bathroom but to a world that smelled of heat and purple sage and fear in a handful of dust, a world that now lay under the shadowing wing of night.
Instead they simply recycled and began to play themselves over again, like a tape set to repeat and repeat until it either breaks or someone comes along and shuts it off.
He could remember going to school, and to the movies on the weekend, and out to Sunday brunch with his parents a week ago (or had it been two?), but he remembered these things the way a man who has suffered malaria may remember the deepest, darkest phase of his illness: people became shadows, voices seemed to echo and overlap each other, and even such a simple act as eating a sandwich or obtaining a Coke from the machine in the gymnasium became a struggle.
“Not for long,” Tower said. He moved his bishop. Aaron promptly bagged it. Tower muttered something under his breath. To Jake it sounded suspiciously like fuckwad.
There was something wrong. He could feel a pulsing discord, like a deep and ugly scratch across some priceless work of art or a deadly fever smouldering beneath the chilly skin of an invalid’s brow.
Elmer Chambers was wearing faded jeans and cowboy boots that improved his five-ten to a rootin, tootin six feet. His black, crewcut hair bolted up from his head; for as long as Jake could remember, his father had looked like a man who had just suffered some tremendous, galvanizing shock.
“I don’t work for you,” Jake said. “I’m your son, remember? If you forgot, check the picture on your desk.”
His father’s upper lip pulled back from his perfectly capped teeth in a snarl that was two parts surprise and one part fury.
He seemed not only calmer but almost zonked. Jake wondered briefly and indifferently if he had been hitting his mother’s Valium supply.
Jake could imagine children all over America blatting their heads off at this point, and it occurred to him that there were a lot of stories for kids with stuff like this in them, stuff that threw acid all over your emotions.
Engineer Bob sat in the cab, pulling the whistle-cord and looking as happy as a pig in shit.
He felt like a compass needle. The needle knows nothing about magnetic north; it only knows it must point in a certain direction, like it or not.
His eyes were filling with some great emotion, as a pitcher fills with water when it is dipped in a spring.
He stopped, frowning at the salutation. What went below it? What, exactly, did he have to say? That he loved them? It was true, but it wasn’t enough—there were all sorts of other unpleasant truths stuck through that central one, like steel needles jabbed into a ball of yarn.
He drank and then began to unfold her chair. Eddie had come to hate this bulky, balky contraption; it was like an iron anchor.
The chair bumped and pitched, and every now and then Eddie and Roland had to lift it over the cobbles which stuck out of the dirt here and there like old teeth.
Susannah slipped into the woods at the side of the road with eely sinuousness.
Jake was almost ready to make his move. Eddie had been chosen to midwife the boy into this world. If he wasn’t prepared to do that, Jake would die at the point of entry, as surely as an infant must strangle if the mother-root is tangled about its neck when the contractions begin.
I CRY YOUR PARDON
What does that mean? Jake wondered. He didn’t know—something from the Bible, maybe—but it held like the eye of a snake is reputed to hold a bird.
The old man watched him go. “Sir!” he said to himself in a tone of mild amazement. “Sir, yet!”
He chuckled rustily and moved on.
Until the gunslinger shook him awake at four in the morning, he heard the wind racing endlessly over the plain below them, and it seemed to him that he went with it, flying high into the night, away from these cares, while Old Star and Old Mother rode serenely above him, painting his cheeks with frost.
Jake just had time to turn around and begin to scan the names beside the rank of buzzers before Eddie Dean brushed past him, so close that Jake could smell the sweat he had worked up on the basketball court.
He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormality, with a sinking heart. It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor.
It slumped in the hot light, a ramshackle slate-roofed revenant growing out of a hummocky trash-littered yard, somehow making Jake think of a dangerous dog which pretended to be asleep. Its steep roof overhung the front porch like a beetling brow. The boards of the porch were splintery and warped. Shutters which might once have been green leaned askew beside the glassless windows; ancient curtains still hung in some of these, dangling like strips of dead skin. To the left, an elderly trellis leaned away from the building, now held up not by nails but only by the nameless and somehow filthy clusters of vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on the door. From where Jake stood, he could read neither of them.
Behind him, traffic passed back and forth on Rhinehold Street and a woman was yelling for her daughter to stop holding hands with that boy and bring in the wash, but here was another world, one ruled by some bleak being over whom guns could have no power.
“Oy!” the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anxiously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.
These days, thinking about his life in New York and his career as a student at Piper was like looking into the wrong end of a telescope.
The orderly shape they made showed the presence of the Beam as clearly as smoke leaving a chimney shows the direction of the wind.
Jake sat up and looked toward Lud, where the windows of the western towers reflected back the late afternoon light in golden sheets.
The man in the cockpit was a dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.
He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where overstressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.
The skyline reminded him of a diseased jaw from which many teeth have already fallen.
Eddie inspected the closest one with the avid interest of a man who may soon be entrusting his life to the object he is studying.
His lips spread wide, revealing a few remaining teeth that jutted from his white gums like decayed tombstones.
That smell of wet decay—a smell that seemed almost to snarl in the nose—was stronger than ever.
The grin widened, revealing his oozing whitish gums, a sight Jake could have done without.
He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble.
“Sorry, guy,” Eddie murmured, and shot him in the chest.
Clarabell/Ronald staggered backward, one hand going to his shirt. He stared at Eddie with huge eyes that told his tale with heartbreaking clarity: this wasn’t supposed to happen.
One by one, they complied. The woman who was wearing a pint or so of Mr. Sword-and-Kilt’s blood on her face said, “You shouldn’t’ve killed Winston, missus—’twas his birthday, so it was.”
“Well, I guess he should have stayed home and eaten some more birthday cake,” Eddie said. Given the overall quality of this experience, he didn’t find either the woman’s comment or his own response at all surreal.
The others were staring at Eddie and Susannah with expressions of uncomprehending amazement; it was as if the interlopers had suggested to a bunch of born-again Christians that they hunt up the Ark of the Covenant and turn it into a pay toilet.
The gold rings in his eyes gleamed like medallions in the dim light.
“We’re close,” he murmured into the bumbler’s cocked ear, “and so we have to be quiet. Do you understand, Oy? Very quiet.”
“I-yet,” Oy replied in a hoarse whisper that would have been funny under other circumstances.
Susannah gasped. Her face wore the dismayed expression of a devout woman who has just heard her husband blaspheme in a cathedral.
His hair, a dirty gray-blonde, cascaded almost to the middle of his broad back; his eyes were as green and curious as the eyes of a tomcat who is old enough to be wise but not old enough to have lost that refined sense of cruelty which passes for fun in feline circles.
After a moment, Tick-Tock looked back at Jake, and a sunny smile replaced the frown. Looking at that smile almost made you forget that it was a dead woman and not a movie Mexican taking a siesta against an adobe wall.
There was no sudden rage on Tick-Tock’s part this time; his face darkened gradually instead, like a summer sky before a terrible thunderstorm.
Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me. Jake of New York. Uh . . . son of Elmer.”
“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.
Jake had begun to flag badly. Roland swept him into his arms again and chased the steel ball past machines at whose function and intent he could not even guess.
Below it, Roland’s knuckles rippled up and down like the heddles of a loom.
“WHAT GOOD ARE YOU TO ME IF YOU WON’T TELL ME RIDDLES?” Blaine asked. Now he sounded like a grumbling, sulky child who has been allowed to stay up too long past his usual bedtime.
“HOW HAVE I BEEN STUPID, ROLAND OF GILEAD?” Blaine’s voice was soft and ominous. Susannah suddenly thought of a cat crouched outside a mouse-hole, tail swishing back and forth, green eyes shining.
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