Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Challenge: Weirdest Thing I Learned Reading Fiction

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is The Weirdest Thing I learned Reading Fiction, and my friends I am having a hard time with this -- partly because at my age, I have a hard time remembering what I've learned, let alone where I learned it.

In fact, there's really only one that sticks in my mind that I can specifically trace to reading fiction. It's from one of the Stephen King books, and to be honest I don't remember which one. (He tends to drop bits of his research directly into his writing, and the didactic quality of this is probably why it stood out to me.) I know it makes an appearance during the Dark Tower books, but I think he actually explains it in another book entirely:

It is possible for a gunshot wound to the head to fail to penetrate the skull, and instead, make a loop around one side beneath the skin -- this giving a very good impression of a killing shot, at least if you don't look closely at the body.

I'm really kind of baffled that I can't think of any other examples to pair it against -- I know there are a lot of things I've picked up from reading fiction, and I'm sure some of them are at least as weird (and macabre) as this one, but apparently that's the only one I'm going to come up with.

I'm looking forward to see what everybody else comes up with for this one.

11 comments:

  1. I didn't know that about a head shot. When my brother was a cop he told me that a number of victims reported thinking they were hit in the back of the head. It turns out that the skull is pretty strong and the bullets bounced off. https://pmprescott.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-weirdest-thing-ive-learned-reading.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I believe it. Human bodies can be amazingly resilient.

      Delete
  2. I had no idea such a thing were possible. Is it safe to assume the character survived that?

    My post: https://lydiaschoch.com/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-the-weirdest-thing-i-learned-reading-fiction/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, he did... unfortunately it was one of the Bad Guys.

      Delete
  3. I learned in a Stephen King book you can mutilate someone with a can opener. I'm not sure which kind it was now, but I remember it sticking in my brain as strange. So there we go.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stephen King: filling our brains with macabre trivia since 1967.

      Delete
  4. And yet no one accuses those authors of actually being murderers. But as a writer of erotic romance novels, I get asked for sexual advice, as if I'm some kind of expert. It's fiction, people! Americans are totally fine with murder and gore, but suggest some sex and they act like middle-schoolers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I did not know that. Kind of gross, but lucky for that character!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ooh, was that in Duma Key, Michael? I remember that too and was rather amazed.
    He does come up with some awesome things in his books!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I can remember Stephen King describing how to trap someone under a road in their car in "Dolan's Cadillac", but he did later say the method as described wouldn't work. A little complicated for a murder method anyway.

    ReplyDelete

Feel free to leave comments; it lets me know that people are actually reading my blog. Interesting tangents and topic drift just add flavor. Linking to your own stuff is fine, as long as it's at least loosely relevant. Be civil, and have fun!