The Rat-Eye Dark

There a few books that I’ll randomly pick up and read a page or two of, then quickly move on. I’ll do it for inspiration. Or because I’m in one of those restless reading moods.

Underworld, by Don DeLillo, is one such book.

I can read any page and immediately be transported into the novel’s universe.

Here’s one such passage that I read today (page 635), describing a blackout in New York City:

“The streets began to darken, drained of traffic and headlights, and an odd calm set in, edged with apprehension. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands trapped in subways or aloft in packed elevators waiting. The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rat-eye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyway.”

One of the things I love about DeLillo is those startling phrases and descriptions he packs into his sentences: “the rat-eye dark,” “edged with apprehension,” “the push-button city.”