Day 74.1: Holy Terror in The Violent Bear It Away

[sunshowerdandelion]

That scene with Bishop!! Oh goodness the scene really scared me, the creeping, smiling way he walks to Tarwater! And the absolutely apocalyptic imagery that Tarwater suffers from, the city like car-bodies burnt and sinking (like the body of his granduncle, burnt and sinking), and those creepy, silver, fishlike eyes of his dead granduncle (wheeling like chariots in the sky above him), and the constant flashes of his version of 'heaven', a desolate land full of broken fish and endlessly multiplying loaves of bread, and the vision of 'a bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus'! What a wallop! I think this is the best uncanny novel I've read all year honestly. That desolate faith, that foreboding, 'certainty sunk in despair'.