I just finished reading Fireworks by Jim Thompson, so I officially have no more of his work to read. Everything that has been published has passed before my eyes. Unless new work is discovered, I will spend the rest of my life without reading anything from him that I haven't already read.
Take a look at that cover. It took me a while to figure out what that was. Way more time than it should have. It's a spindle. No one ever uses spindles today because they're dangerous to have around. I saw a few of them in shops and offices when I worked as a parts driver for the City of Elmhurst, but that was twenty years ago. Even back then I thought it was crazy that anyone still used them. So crazy that I used one in my first book, Strip.
If you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, way back when, people used to use spindles to keep track of receipts. Spindles are spikes that point up from someone's desk, and people impaled receipts on them. If you slipped in your office you were likely to impale yourself on it, hence the danger.
Thompson uses it as a weapon in this book. A character pulls another character off balance in an office setting, and that guy lands on his spindle, shoving it through his mouth and out the back of his head. Pretty cool. I liked it.
Here's a part of my writing that no one ever brings up to me: my use of foreshadowing. I don't lack the subtlety of, say, Ti West foreshadowing deaths in X, but I don't think I was hiding it all that well. Here's what happens in Strip:
I just realized I was about to spoil one of my own books. Whoops. I'll try to be vague about it. There is a character, at the end of the book, who kills another character by putting a spindle through that person's eye. Earlier in the book, I believe in the first chapter, the killer sits in that same office fantasizing about shoving that same spindle into someone's eye and killing them.
Spindles, at least in fiction, should make a comeback. They make for excellent weapons.
I'll bet you've never read an essay that uses the word "spindle" as much as this one does.
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