conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Hunter, Directed, Charles with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Night of the Hunter'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Night of the Hunter
  While Ben was in prison, his cellmate was a creepy, twisted, God-haunted wreck of a man who calls himself Preacher. Once Preacher is free, he seeks out Ben's children, certain that they know the location of the dough. Preacher woos and wins Ben's widow—while John watches in mounting terror, immune to Preacher's charms. Indeed, the man's very presence puts "the smell of dread in his nose" until "doglike his flesh gathered and bunched at the scent of it." Soon John and Pearl are on the run across the Ohio River Valley, desperate to escape what the novel calls "something as old and dark as the things on the river's bed, old as evil itself."
  Killing a world: Was there ever a better, more succinct mission statement for a serial killer, for the kind of criminal whose compulsions come in bunches and never let him go? Grubb's novel is about a dark soul in a dark time, and it is about, too, the solace of fighting back against that darkness, and of "knowing that children are man at his strongest, that they are possessed, in those few short seasons of the little years, of more strength and endurance than God is ever to grant them again." In other words: Game on. Let the hunter's night commence.
  A child's hand and a piece of chalk had made it: a careful, child's scrawl of white lines on the red bricks of the wall beside Jander's Livery Stable: a crude pair of sticks for the gallows tree, a thick broken line for the rope, and then the scarecrow of the hanging man. Some passing by along that road did not see it at all; others saw it and remembered what it meant and thought solemn thoughts and turned their eyes to the house down the river road. The little children—the poor little children. Theirs were the eyes for which the crude picture was intended and they had seen it and heard along Peacock Alley the mocking child rhyme that went with it. And now, in the kitchen of that stricken house, they ate their breakfast in silence. Then Pearl stopped suddenly and frowned at her brother.
  John scowled, pressing his lips together, while their mother stared out the window into the yellow March morning that flowered in the dried honeysuckle along the window. A cold winter sun shot glistening rays among the early mists from the river.
  Yet John frowned still, watching as the little girl resumed eating, and would not let the matter lie.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Uncle Birdie blew his nose against one scarred, horny finger and cocked a wise blue eye sidelong at the boy in the boat.
  John's lips grew thin as string and the old shadow flickered back behind his eyes again: the dark gar in the river of his mind.
  Birdie stuffed his cheek full of fresh Mail Pouch and stared off into the shore willows, draped softly out over the still shallows clean to the bend below the orchard.
  Never was much of a one for preachers myself, said the old man, with another sidelong glance, quick as a robin's eye. But then I reckon there is all sorts.
  John swallowed quickly and his wide eyes were lost in the river. Now Uncle Birdie reached out a scaly, hook-scarred finger and turned the child's face to meet his eyes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And again he pressed his face to the cold pane in the parlor window and stared across the white sheen of fresh snow that blanketed the valley under the winter's moon.
  Because someone is chasing them, he thought. That's why they picked up and started running. I reckon that's what she meant because there was another story she told us about the bad king and the children who ran. I wish I could remember stuff. It all gets mixed up inside you. And sometimes you can't remember if things is real or just a story. You never know.
  In the kitchen now he could hear Rachel hollering about how pretty Ruby and the rest of them all looked in their dresses and directly she yelled for him to come, that it was time they all got to their beds. But there was no sleep for John for a long, ticking time that night. Crouched beneath the bright, heaped quilts he stared at the watch on the string; watching the circuit of the creeping golden hands until they marked the passing of an hour. Pearl hunched warm and sleeping beside him. In the other bed Clary and Little Mary smiled and wriggled in their dreams. And John lay listening to the faint, bright ticking and then he heeded some secret and forgotten bidding of his memory and looked at the place where, on the ancient, flowered wallpaper of the bedroom, the moon cast its square of pale light through the windowpane. The branches of the apple tree shook their naked winter fingers in the gusts of harsh wind from the river. And in that new, pale proscenium of light John saw again the dancers, the black horse prancing and the brave little soldier and the clown with his toothpick legs. Now when John shut his left eye the soldier waved his sword gaily and the charging mare frollicked and tossed her forelegs to the stars. And yet something else awaited its cue in the wings of that arena: the shape of a man who had stood there in a lost time long ago. Silently John slipped from beneath the covers into the icy air and stole shivering across the cold floor to the window sill. Then he saw that the black shape had, indeed, returned, standing as it had before, as he had known it would be. John lifted an arm and the specter did the same. He twisted his body that way and this and lifted his arms above his head and wiggled his hands and the shadow mimicked every finger, every nodding lock of bushy hair. Then John felt the cold watch pressing against his naked breast.
  I ain't afraid of you! he whispered to the shadows. I got a watch that ticks! I got a watch that shines in the dark!
  And with that he scurried back into the bed and lay still for a long while, heart thundering, daring not look to see if the shadow man had been angered as before and had stayed, fixed to that white square of moonlight: watching, waiting, speculating before he moved on, singing down some fateful country lane among dream meadows that were breathless beneath the affrighted moon. At last he forced his eyes to turn again and look and he saw that the man was not there. Only the others remained: the horse dancing and the soldier waving his sword at the circling winter galaxies and the clown pirouetting on his spindly legs. But the night of the hunter was gone forever and the blue men would not come again. And so John pulled the gospel quilt snug around his ear and fell into a dreamless winter sleep, curled up beneath the quaint, stiff calico figures of the world's forgotten kings, and the strong, gentle shepherds of that fallen, ancient time who had guarded their small lambs against the night.