background in slenderman the arrival showing up as red lines

#Background in slenderman the arrival showing up as red lines free#

By the time he raises the axe above his head, the water splashed on the blade freezes in a glassy sheath. He opens the lake for the ice-cutters, water spurts and gurgles in the wound. With each blow, shards of ice leap like sparks in the air. The axe makes a terrible ringing on the ice, a clash like metal striking metal. He sees the long rivers of fracture, the widely flung tributary cracks. He thinks of the waves which ran one after another in slow succession to shore until winter laid its dead hand upon their backs, binding up the heaves and swells, arresting motion. Walking over the ice he can sense the yaw and pitch, the tilt, the gentle undulations that cannot be seen but must be felt, things the eye skates over, fails to register. Down from the sledge, standing on bare, clean ice he can feel the cold rise through the soles of his boots, seep through stockings, sting toes. It pounds the drum-skins of tightly drawn parka hoods.

It raises gooseflesh and tears the manes of the horses into ragged, whipping flags. By fits and starts this wind gathers force, the skirts of coats billow and snap, its fierce touch penetrates every layer of clothing, drives nails of cold through coveralls, trousers, woollen combinations.

There it is now, the first long drawn-out sigh of breath tumbling over the hills, the faint breeze setting snow snakes writhing out over the ice and hard-packed drifts to meet them. On the lake there is only flatness, a rushing space that squeezes eyes into a squint. On the lake there is no place to escape it, no trees, no sheds, no bluffs to hunker down and hide behind. When the sun finally rises, so does the wind, bitter and cutting. Before them the sky lightens over purple-shadowed, hunch-shouldered hills. The runners hiss on the dry snow, metal bits in the harness shift and clink, leather reins freeze so hard they lie stiff and straight as laths down the horses’ backs. The Feinrich brothers and he drive their sledges out on to the wide white plain of the lake. He is young again, once more an ice-cutter laying up a store of ice for the summer. Portions of this novel have previously appeared in the following: a slightly altered version of Chapter 1 was read on CBC Radio’s “Speaking Volumes” and “Aircraft” Chapter 3 previously appeared in Books in Canada.Īn old man lay asleep in his bed. I would also like to express my thanks to my editor Ellen Seligman for her careful and thoughtful labours. I would like to thank the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their generous financial assistance during the writing of Homesick. With its tenderness, humour, and vivid evocation of character and place, Homesick confirms Guy Vanderhaeghe's reputation as one of Canada's most engaging and accomplished storytellers. As the story gradually unfolds, the past confronts the present in unexpected ways as the silence surrounding Vera's brother is finally shattered and the truth behind Vera's long absence revealed. Now, for the sake of her young son, she must swallow her pride and return home after seventeen years. Fiercely independent, Vera has been on her own since running away at nineteen – first to the army, and then to Toronto. It is the summer of 1959, and in a prairie town in Saskatchewan, Alec Monkman waits for his estranged daughter to come home, with the grandson he has never seen. He uses his medium very effectively to capture both the icy harshness and the warmth of family life… Homesick is an unexpectedly powerful work… His extraordinary talents deserve wide recognition.” – Whig-Standard (Kingston) “Beautifully written… Vanderhaeghe writes in a spare, poetic prose that is deceptively simple. “Guy Vanderhaeghe writes about what he knows best: people, their sense of mortality, their difficulty in being good during a difficult time… The dialogue and the characters are eclectic and real.” – Vancouver Sun “His stories and novels are character studies par excellence…” – Andreas Schroeder

#Background in slenderman the arrival showing up as red lines free#

“Vanderhaeghe has an unerring eye for the prairie landscape and a shrewd ear for the ironies of small-town conversation… He balances his dramatization of the cycle of life with exuberant storytelling…” – London Free Press “ lift themselves by pride and love from the ordinariness of their world.” – Ottawa Citizen “If great art is that which holds a mirror up to nature, as was once said, then Homesick is great art.” – Daily News (Halifax) “One has only to read the first page of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Homesick to see why his books have garnered him international awards…” – Regina Leader-Post Genre: prose_contemporary Homesick Guy Vanderhaeghe