The Broom of the System: A Novel

Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.”

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.