One short sentence followed by several others sometimes gets irritating. It breaks the flow of your reading and it makes paragraphs feel hollow. But Oates' did it exceptionally well in Beasts. The beginning of the book was strewn with short sentences that never allowed any rhythm or flow to emerge. What it did do was make me sit up and take notice of each sentence in a way that other books rarely do. What I thought was a lack of artistic flair turned out to be a precursor to a wonderfully crafted sequence which makes the short sentences worthwhile. Plums deify. Stephen King says that makes perfect (grammatical) sense, and that short sentences should suit authors who're not as much in control of their sentences as they'd like to be. But I think he's missing the kind of usage that Oates has, the kind that sometimes brings flair simply by delaying it.
I'm an arsonist at heart. I light fires tentatively, with much trepidation and little tolerance for heat. I shy away from the ensuing flame, and usually panic when it reaches my hand. I've only let a matchstick burn to my fingertips once, and that was just to find out how it felt. But I'm an arsonist at heart. I look at the oil slick, curving its way from the car. Its bends are lazy, pronounced. Like a section of a river that flows slowly over the ground, knowing its reduced speed, almost enjoying it. The slick is thick in clusters, where the bubbles inside the oil almost threaten to burst. The oil dries away before it reaches me, its riverbank a small lump of gravel that the oil bubbles collect against, rising in number, like a protest that goes on eternally. I just stare at the oil. It looks so inviting, so delicious. A matchstick might be enough, a box of matchsticks better. A lit up Zippo might have been perfect. I'm scared of flames. I've sprayed deodorant at c...
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