From Blackout by Campbell Armstrong

1. Read the extract bellow and say what it is about.

2. What mood is set in by the first paragraph?

3. Is the first paragraph suggestive of the mood, which is enhanced in the second and the third paragraphs? Give your reasons. Here you may speak on the role of segmentation in the description of the man's anxiety.

4. What tropes and figures of speech help the author to depict the man's hallucinatory mind?

5. Speak on the rhythm created by the paralle constructions in the closing paragraph. What stylistic devices follow them? Dwell upon their role.

They walked downstairs to the living room. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a large cognac, noticing the Scrabble game on the coffee table. "Nick gone home?" He needed to make small talk. Where you didn't have to think. As if you were concussed.

"A few minutes ago."

He swallowed some of the brandy. He sat down, and the room rushed at him all at once as if he had turned over just like the Chrysler. He was dizzy and faint and felt like an astronaut inside a space capsule. There were inversions, strange flips, optical illusions. A voltage spike on the graph of perception. Photographs turning over, Harriet's lovely face upside down on the mantelpiece, the hands of the clock hurrying backwards.

His fingers shook. The brandy in the glass rippled. He closed his eyes. What he saw behind his eyelids was shallow pool of water and the broken branch and something black flapping in the air like a predatory bird, eyes lethal.

From Simply Divine by Wendy Holden

1. Read the extract bellow and assertain its theme. Is it states right at once?

2. What mood is set by the opening paragraph?

3. What was Jane's problem? How did Jane find herself on the staircase?

4. Group the metaphors and epithets used in the extract. Say what effect is produced by each group to serve the author's purpot.

5. Account for the author's choice of the words "click", "yowling", "um" in the extract.

6. PIck out the sentences written in the ironic key. Comment on them.

7. What other stulistic devices jump into the reader's eye? What effect do they rpoduce?

8. Was Jane attracted to the man who helped her re-enter her flat? What stylistic devices contribute to this idea?

9. What makes Jane's defeated expectancy at the end of the extract so pronounced?

Jane went into the bathroom and shot out again instantly. The air was filled with an ear-splitting shriek which she realized , after a few seconds, was her own. To accompany it, a series of crashing thuds from upstairs shook the flat above. But Jane hardly noticed. The last thing to register with any of her senses was the huge spider crouched in the bottom of the bath. Vast, malevolent and murdorous - looking, with terrifying markings on its back, it had evidently marched in from the garden while they were reading the papers.

Still sreaching, Jane bolted through the hall and out into the entrance passageway, leaving the door of the flat wide open. As she paused for breath, she heard it click hut behind her.

"Need any help?"

Head spinning with fear of the hideous beast in the tub and the dawning, dreadful awareness that she was locked out of the flat, Jane stared wildly up the stairwelll to the next floor. The man from upstairs was leaning over the barrister. Grinning at her. Grinning, it had to be said, more widely than the circumstances merited. [...]

"What were you yowling about? What's the problem?"

"Well," Jane muttered, suddenly feeling silly. "Ther's, um,ther's, um, there's a rather large spider in my, um, bath."

"Spiders won't hurt you," said her neighbour breezily. "It won't even move unless you make it. The whole point of a spider is being a spider. They don't go in for sightseeing or aerobics."

"Well, this one got a leotard on, actually," flashed back Jane, remembering the nasty markings and determined to claw back some dignity out of the situation. [...]

Two minutes later he had bounded down again, opened the latch with a credit card, entered the flat, and flipped the spider out of the bathroom window.

"Thank you so much," said Jane, stiff with embarrassment and cold.

"It's a pleasure. I'm Tom, by the way." He flashed her another knee-trembler of a grin.

"I'm Jane."

"Yes," he said. "I know."

"You know?" Her heart swooped in a somersault. He knew her name. Jane surrendered herself to the thrilling thought that he must have more than a passing interest in her to bother finding out what she was called.

"Yes. There's a pile of bills with your name and address on them by your door."