![]() ![]() They weren’t just a news clip or a sound bite online anymore. Assassination weapons came in every size and shape, thirty-one flavors of destruction.īoston had taught Americans that they weren’t invulnerable to IEDs. Neither were the Secret Service agents, the president’s white knights.Īssassinations didn’t have to be carried out with a gun. The office, the title, was not bullet proof. President Kennedy had been killed, and his brother after that. It was easy to slide into the crowd, to hide between the smiles and the waving hands.Īll it took was one concealed weapon, one fast draw. Everyone wanting to be acknowledged by the most powerful man on the planet. ![]() Hordes of people, rushing for a handshake, a look, a smile. American Secret Service agents stood beside their president on a handshake line, but in the crush and swarming mass of bodies, they couldn’t get eyes on every single person. No matter how tight the security, how rehearsed the preparations, life always came with weaknesses. ![]() Assassinations were, when it came right down to it, easy. ![]()
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![]() ![]() As a mere object, people want his corpse "for science" and "for art." "All of us sought his flesh," Rembrandt muses. ![]() Alive, Adriaen's body is "beaten and branded" by his Calvinist father and by several Dutch towns. Adriaen's pregnant lover, Flora, is the only person clamoring for possession of the man's body out of love to give it a "Christian burial" after she fails to convince a clerk at the town hall to issue a pardon. ![]() Adriaen pleads, " here is no evil in my breast.'" The evil, Siegal hints, might well lie in a place where Justice Day is received with such pleasure. Nicolaes Tulp, on which the novel is based, and Descartes, who is " search for the soul in the body.'" Siegal gives voice not only to artists and philosophers, but also to the condemned man Adriaen Adriaenszoon, among others. Siegal (A Little Trouble With the Facts) sets her splendid, gory second novel in 1623 in Amsterdam, where a thief's execution occasions a celebration, evoking "bloodlust" throughout the city on "Justice Day." Some of the narrators are famous men: Rembrandt, who painted Anatomical Lesson of Dr. ![]() ![]() The nearly 40 pages of mystical descriptions from the original novel (i.e., an exploding sun and the notion of traveling the breadth of the universe in an instant) are judiciously adapted to the graphic novel format. Or do they? Hodgson's hair-raising story brings into question the very sanity and reliability of the narrator himself. In the winding cellar corridors of the decrepit house, Gault, his sister and their dog fight off savage attacks by cloven-hoofed half-humans erupting from the depths of the mansion's foundations. They read aloud from the moldy tome, invoking the horrible story of Hodgson's fictional narrator, Byron Gault, who tells a harrowing tale of inexplicable evil and violent struggle against terrors. In Revelstroke's adaptation, two young backpackers discover a decaying manuscript among the ancient ruins of a manor house in the remote Irish countryside. It's the haunting tale of an accursed mansion teetering metaphorically between hallucinatory human visions and the dark bottomless pit of the human subconscious. Proves fertile ground for legendary underground comix artist Richard Corben. William Hope Hodgson's visionary 1908 novel The House on the Borderland ![]() |