Endnote 162 — The paintings that repelled the test audience

Describes the gallery of grotesque anti-portraits that made Nielsen test viewers recoil — a face sprouting every carpenter's tool, a shark-crowned woman, a "Baconian pope with his hat on fire" (p. 1030) — and singles out the one that fixed nine-year-old Hal: a tanned, "vaguely familiar upscale male" (p. 1031) with a fist tearing brains from his ear, wearing a look "more of like brooding" (p. 1031) than of pain.