Word: shudder
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...scene from Psycho is a grisly shudder in the collective unconscious, as bracing as Janet Leigh's famous shower and possibly even more shocking. The detective, played by Martin Balsam, is climbing the stairway of Norman Bates' creepy old house, his cautious tread accompanied by a few high-pitched notes in the violins, pregnant with mystery and menace. As he reaches the landing, a door flies open in a glint of flashing steel: suddenly the strings shriek rhythmically, as the knife blade slashes down and the stricken cop topples backward to his death in a symphony of pizzicato cellos...
...find some horror story about government bureaucracy or a new P.J. O'Rourke article or something. After all, the Center may start branching out with its Top 10 liberal lists, and I have no desire to be included on one. Given their track record with television, I shudder to think what they'd do with a description...
Then we meet Crumb's brothers Charles and Max, and we realize with a shudder that Robert is the normal one. Charles was the one who encouraged--forced, really--Robert to draw. Gradually Charles' own comics became choked with words, rantings in a minute hand. For 30 years now he has hardly left his mother's house. Max eats string, sits on a bed of nails, then goes begging. He felt that his elder brothers never encouraged him to create art. He finally did, saw that it was good, and had an epileptic seizure...
...they drag on the floor, producing an unremittingly irksome scraping noise and leaving a silvery circular trail behind them, round and round. You don't feel empathy with the dead animals--the molds are too blank to evoke much more than the merest ghost of pathos--but you shudder at the gratuitousness of their posthumous torment. It's like a brief glimpse of animal hell, going on forever...
...Shudder. shudder...