Word: gruel
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That empathy with the Devil--taking a despicable character and slowly bringing us around to his side--is the sort of thing Hill does best. It's also what's missing from so much of the girl-meets-vampire gruel that dominates the genre these days. "The writer's first job in horror fiction is to convince the reader that there is a real person there to care about," says Hill. "If you don't have that, you don't have anything...
...U.S.S.R. both had The Bomb, what was the point in pretense or courtesy? Pinter's quietly murderous insolence was the theatrical equivalent to Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the United Nations. Good manners were the creamy lie the great powers poured on the toxic gruel of their realpolitik. The only counteroffensive was to write plays in which people misbehaved, tortured each other; for the postwar generation, writing what the Cambridge Review called his "skull-beneath-the-skin" plays, he was the Pinter of Our Discontent. Back then, his works were taken as murky dramas; now they look like snarky...
Still, a starving man won't pass up gruel just because it's not Mom's pot roast. And after Lieberman gave the delegates that first mouthful of stewed maverick, things started looking...
...even in coach. There are power outlets at every seat. The most profound change, though, doesn't look like much of an improvement at first. Like many U.S. carriers, Virgin America charges for food in economy class. But flight attendants don't dole it out from a cart like gruel in the orphanage; a touchscreen at each seat lets passengers pick what they want and pay by credit card. A few minutes after I swiped my card, an attendant brought my fruit-and-cheese box and a glass of cabernet to my seat. The food was fine, but what...
...will have to travel. The snakehead has promised Little Lin a real tourist visa to Russia, then a clandestine overland trip through Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and onward to England. Little Lin knows he will have to hide in vans and safe houses and subsist on rice gruel. But he is optimistic. Someone from his village recently arrived safely in England after using the same snakehead he has contacted. "It's very safe," he insists. "Bad things can happen here...