Word: coffined
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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CONRAD AIKEN'S new book is a terrifying psychological study of Jasper Ammen, an egocentric, ruthless character, who plans to commit murder simply to expand his great self-satisfaction. Ammen has heard somewhere the name "King Coffin." His desire is to fuse himself with that symbol, to become the awful, mystic figure of King Coffin himself...
From a purely external point of view we wonder how much the background of this novel, which is Cambridge and Boston and especially the region of Harvard Square, will mean to the outside. The story is full of touches and names, many of them literal (King Coffin has the residents of the Plympton Street apartment all agog. Aiken lived there until last year), which accentuate the horror of the story by their very familiarity...
...occupies himself with the search for a victime, most preferably someone ordinary, commonplace, average, whom he can observe and follow for a sufficiently soul-filling time before he strikes the blow. Up to a certain point "King Coffin's" plans go well; he has lured his prey here and there; he has him at his absolute mercy. Then a swift change of events alters the whole aspect of the situation. Ammen begins to regain his sanity...
...SHOOT INNOCENT CITIZENS WHO SOUGHT TO DEFEND THEIR HOME. In the drab parlor, where John Crempa and his young son and daughter, all arrested last fortnight, sat fiercely brooding, a Roman Catholic priest intoned the service for the dead. Then Sophie Crempa's corpse was lifted in its coffin through a window, lowered to the yard for the crowd's inspection. John Crempa, wounded in hand and leg by deputies' bullets, was carried out on the porch in the arms of a husky friend. The thin, overwrought widower stopped crying long enough to lift his bandaged left...
...Field Marshal von Mackensen and many another stood at attention in impressive ceremony as the body of Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg was transferred from a side tower of the massive Tannenberg war memorial to a permanent vault in the centre tower. Over the national hero's coffin lay the old German war flag with the iron cross on red, white and black. At half-mast everywhere else in Germany only the new Nazi swastika banner was allowed...