jacob graham’s Reviews > The Vorrh > Status Update

2/2: ". . . It was not maternal and was certainly not fed by perversity from the injuries of his brutality. It was her presence, which had become entangled with his, behind circumstances and sometimes even personality. She would stay until the end . . . She now understood that the rest of their time together would be . . . a constant dusk. She would maintain it and work on its luminance."

1/2: "His death was the enigma that stalked her life, and . . . it was not the tangled weight of responsibility that . . . kept her close; it was something stronger, something strangely unnecessary and totally essential; a kind of love; a constant need to contain and guard with unflinching proximity."

"Yet again, sight had trampled everything else, and she had been lessened by it . . . She wanted to wrap herself in the darkness of the bedsheets and banish all visual memory, to remember only the luxurious depth of her stored library of touch, sound, and scent."

2/2: ". . . None of the hurt and shame had lasted past his fifth hour among the trees. He was unbridled, and the yoke of his previous emotions lay in discarded ruins at the entrance of his new life."

1/2: "But he was now sure that he was not human. Maybe some part of him had been gleaned from there, but not his whole . . . He would not be sullied by their fears or crippled by their imperfection . . . here, in the midst of the Vorrh, they all seemed petty and trivial . . ."

2/2: "The Frenchman was amazed and embarrassed at such a poignant answer to the question that had formed between his mouth and his mind, in the vapour of his heart, and evaporated in exact proportion to the intensity of their physical response."

1/2: "They turned . . . to look more intently at the Limboia, who instantly stopped moving and turned into their enquiry, staring back. Then, in unison, [they] unbent the index fingers of their left hands, raised their arms, and pointed to their own hearts . . ."

"The day was . . . converting his . . . conquests into a hollow gruel of cold disgust. He desperately wanted a hot bath and a long, dreamless sleep . . . He wanted to remove every last atom of the tastes and scents that he had so recently cherished; to comb out all their rotted sighs and smiles and never touch a human being again."

". . . [W]hite men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys."

"He possessed, or was possessed by, something else: a crippled soul, which might just pucker into genius, if only he allowed his wretched shred of joy to grow. She had seen it . . . The fruitless mangle of emotions, spurred and strangled by the auto-cannibalism of guilt. The humiliation of being animal, the whipping into cruelty of lost affections."