the Fresno saga: deadpan atrocity
by the end of the night the whole family’s lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths
Context
Gruesome catastrophe narrated as deadpan slapstick — the register that can render an atrocity as farce. An entire family poisons itself in sequence, each member dying trying to CPR the last, the kids padding down "in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet," everyone "dead as a rivet" — and the comic deadpan invites the reader to laugh at seven corpses. It's the novel's own irony operating as narrative anesthetic, the tone that lets horror go down smiling. But the mode is unstable on purpose: under the slapstick is a real annihilation, and the "rictus-grimaced mouths" quietly connect the joke-corpses to the Entertainment's smile. The comedy is exactly the fortification the AA sections forbid — a way of not just saying what happened.