The Changed Man (Maps in a Mirror, Book 1)
Orson Scott Card
Language: English
Pages: 186
ISBN: 0812533658
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Eleven chilling tales, including the author's introductions and afterword comments, provoke the dreaded dark side of the reader's imagination.
icky stuff that makes King’s stories work. It’s how much he makes you care about his characters before the icky stuff ever happens. And his best books are the ones like The Dead Zone and The Stand in which not that much horror ever happens at all. Rather the stories are suffused with dread leading up to cathartic moments of terror and pain. Most important, the suffering that characters go through means something. That is the artistry of fear. To make the audience so empathize with a character
Howard went into the toilet stall and saw nobody. Then looked closer and saw a baby, probably about two months old, lying in the toilet bowl. Its nose and eyes were barely above the water; it looked terrified, its legs and hips and stomach were down the drain. Someone had obviously hoped to kill it by drowning— it was inconceivable to Howard that anyone could be so moronic as to think it would fit down the drain. For a moment he thought of leaving it there, with the big-city temptation to mind
those home for?” Mother asked in the other room. Father said nothing. Joe knew from the silence that Father did not want to make any explanation that might be overheard. “They’re silly,” said Mother. “I thought you were a scientist and a skeptic. I thought you didn’t believe in things like this.” “It was just a lark,” Father lied.”I bought them for Joe to plink around with. He’s thinking of doing a computer program to make the cards respond somehow to people’s personalities. The boy has a
upset. Why would I believe him?” She shook her head and walked out of the room. She hadn’t said a word. But her answer rang in the room as if she had spoken: “Because it’s true.” AFTERWORD AUTHORS HAVE NO more story ideas than anyone else. We all live through or hear about thousands of story ideas a day. Authors are simply more practiced at recognizing them as having the potential to become stories. The real challenge is to move from the idea through the process of inventing the characters
come from a mechanical replacement. They trade places, and both are happy. A simple enough tale, but I couldn’t tell it quite that way. Perhaps because I wanted it to be truer than a fantasy, I told the story from the point of view of a human observer who could never know whether a real trade had taken place or whether the story was just a fantasy that made life livable for a young girl with no arms or legs. Thus it became a story about the stories we tell ourselves that make it possible to live