The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

“‘You could come home with me,’ a voice said from behind her. And that’s how she met Emily. And that was the beginning of everything. Even the end.”

The narrator’s word choice and syntax foreshadow the coming calamities in Maggie’s life. Additionally, the short, blunt sentences add emphasis and slow down the flow of the passage, adding implicit significance to each statement. This tactic lends the scene a rather ominous tone that is intensified by the sentence fragment at the end of this quotation. It is so abrupt and portentous to mention “the end” right at the beginning of a story, and this stylistic choice creates a dire, threatening mood.

“If Killhaven were a high school, then Ethan was the golden boy, player of sports and breaker of hearts. The kind of guy who could get voted prom king at a school he didn’t even go to. Meanwhile, Lance and the other Leather Jacket Guys were nothing more than Ethan’s asshole acolytes. Or Assolytes, as Maggie like to call them.”

This metaphor, which compares Ethan to the most popular boy in high school, uses common social stereotypes to create an immediate image of him as socially popular and physically attractive, with an implied air of easy entitlement. As Maggie sees it, Ethan can do no wrong in the eyes of his adoring audience. This description of him, and his “assolytes”—Maggie’s wry corruption of the word “acolytes”—conveys her summary judgment of Ethan’s character even as it suggests that her bitter resentment unfairly influences her interpretation.