Lenz kills the Nucks' dog (pp. 580–581)
the post-Xmas Mr. Green—whose one encouraging sign of holding some tattered remnants of himself together after the funeral had been the fact that he still went faithfully every day to work at Acme Inc.—had gone in and packed a totally random case of the company’s outgoing Blammo Cigars with vengefully lethal tetryl-based high explosives, and a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and 24 Shriners had been grotesquely decapitated across Southeastern Ohio
Context
The father's grief detonates — Grand Guignol exactly as the plan names it. Mr. Green loads real explosives into his company's practical-joke cigars, decapitating two dozen Shriners across Ohio, and is caught, tried, and Lethally Injected while his son watches: "little Bruce in tow, blank-faced," the aunt "clutching little Bruce's head to her underwired bosom day after day until his blank face was smooshed in on one side." The son is made spectator to the father's death by the state, the same way he was made instrument of the mother's death by the father's joke — bracketed on both ends by a patriarch whose every product is a disguised weapon. The whole arc is one father's wound refracted through explosives and a silent boy: matricide, mass murder, execution, and a child who won't speak again until his last year of grade school.