Teaser Tuesday (2 November)

Here for you, a trio of teasers!

"Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade -- only of adults -- right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are?" protested R.C. Crowley. "It might not be so bad."

p. 29, It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis.

Yet this cemetery breathes an older history. Some people buried here were born in the mid-1700s, and if they were resurrected tomorrow, parts of the town would not look much different to them. Infants who died of yellow fever lie beside Spanish dons and forgotten generals, all moldering beneath crying angels and marble saints, while the gnarled oak branches spread ever wide above them, draped with cinematic beards of Spanish moss. Natchez is the oldest city on the Mississippi River, older even than New Orleans, and when you see the dark, tilted gravestones disappearing into the edges of the forest, you know it.

p. 3, The Devil's Punchbowl. Greg Iles.

"At last we can see!" cried Ned Land, who stood on the alert, knife in hand.

"Yes," I replied, venturing a play on worlds, "but the situation is nonetheless obscure."

(p. 68, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne.)