Word: sharked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hancox scoured the area until other rescue planes arrived. Two hours later the Navy cargo ship Lt. Robert Craig plowed through the shark-filled waters where Mike Sierra went down, later radioed tersely: "Found no survivors . . . Expect to find none...
...more than any of the other stories, a mood and a character which blend into suspense verging on horror, and is thus the only piece which can claim to draw its reader onward. Yet it achieves this only in the narrative. The technical ease of "how to catch a shark" seems to suit the author and the protagonist, which the stream of consciousness soliloquy at the beginning certainly does not. If Davidson can find a tale which talks through its own logic instead of requiring attempts to explain outside the narrative, he may well become a really successful story-teller...
...soil, rednecked goodness of the hill farms is posed against the black-soil, black-souled wickedness of the valley. Indeed the valley, Fate Laird is forced to decide in the end, is "like a pretty woman loaded with syphilis." The chief disease carrier is a dropsical old shark called Book Gresham, the tag end of Tuxahatchie's first family. In defiance of the 13th Amendment, Book Gresham keeps a slave called Bodoc whom he won in a crap game. Symbolically, Book is impotent, apparently the result of one of those odd Southern boyhood experiences (with a Negro woman "musty...
...shark has pretty teeth dear...
...demon," urge her to break with poor Kan-ichi and take the rich man. Blinded by duty, Miya accepts. Insane with pain, Kan-ichi shrieks that "from this night forward I cease to be a human." Since money has mastered him, he will master money. He becomes a loan shark. Miya, meanwhile, is miserable with her wealthy husband, and he with her. Eventually, Miya and Kan-ichi meet again in the ashes of their misspent youth, and begin a new life together...