Head & Shoulders used to tell us that, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That’s true for wearing dark shirts, and it’s especially true for books. Sometimes the characters will hook the reader, sometimes the premise, sometimes it’s just knowing the author—but nothing beats a great opening for getting a reader to commit.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, 11:43 P.M.
He is the last man alive. Or at least, things would be less complicated if he were.He is standing on the platform at the Smith and Ninth Street subway station. The tallest station in Brooklyn looms over the Gowanus Canal. The canal, so polluted with toxins and heavy metals that you don’t have to be Jesus to walk on its waters. A writer once joked it was the only body of water that was 90 percent guns. Nobody is joking tonight. Nobody! Not about anything.
The lone man is waiting for the G train. He smells the acrid windblown smoke continuing to rise from where the World Trade Center stood. His blue Mets cap is squashed low on his forehead, his eyes fixed on the pebbled concrete under his running shoes. He hopes that by not looking up he might be invisible. It makes no rational sense. Today the world stopped making sense. Still, he can’t help but peek at the place where the towers once stood. He quickly looks away. The pile smolders. Ash, shreds of paper, and carcinogenic dust still rise into the air, carried by the prevailing winds. A downy coating of gray snowflakes falls around him.
from Blind to Midnight by Reed Farrel Coleman
Sure, picking up a Coleman novel, you know you’re not in for a romp. But starting off with that date, you know things are going to be grim–and the next three paragraphs emphasize that.
