Tis Dante I prefer. In his Inferno he suggests the one true path from Hell lies at its very heart... ...and that in order to escape, we must instead … - Alan Moore

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! YOU'VE READ ABOUT IT IN THE NEWSPAPERS! NOW, SHUDDER AS YOU OBSERVE, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, THAT MOST RAREAND RAGIC OF NATURE'S MISTAKES!

I GIVE YOU...
THE AVERAGE MAN!


PHYSICALLY
UNREMARKABLE
, IT HAS
INSTEAD
A DEFORMED SET OF
VALUES.


NOTICE THE
HIDEOUSLY BLOATED
SENSE OF
HUMANITY'S IMPORTANCE.
THE CLUB-FOOTED
SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
AND THE
WITHERED OPTIMISM.


IT'S CERTAINLY NOT FOR THE
SQUEAMISH
IS IT?

MOST
REPULSIVE
OF
ALL
, ARE ITS
FRAIL
AND
USELESS
NOTIONS OF
ORDER
AND
SANITY.
IF TOO MUCH
WEIGHT
IS PLACED UPON THEM...

... THEY
SNAP.


HOW DOES IT
LIVE
, I HEAR YOU ASK?

HOW DOES THIS POOR, PATHETIC SPECIMEN
SURVIVE
IN TODAY'S
HARSH
AND
IRRATIONAL
WORLD?

THE SAD ANSWER
IS
'NOT VERY
WELL.

"Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. "The Past Tense," I suppose you'd call it. Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss... the next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten. Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause! So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever."

As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.