Bill Masen and Josella Platon, exhausted survivors of vicious triffids, mutant plants with a taste for human flesh and blood, are stranded in a ruined landscape of Southampton. Wistfully, they are waiting to escape to Isle of Wight, a new Eden, which has been cleared...
Stevens’s A Place in the Sun is a rework of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He renames the characters, too, so that Clyde Griffiths becomes George Eastman. It’s like renaming Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Tarzan. He and his screenwriters are emphatic...
Giant is Ferber’s novel about how a Virginia belle, Leslie Lynton, learns to be a Texan. Among her lessons is what to eat during a Texas-style picnic at her husband Reata, her husband Bick Jordan’s ranch. At first, Leslie realizes what she is looking at is...
Leo Colston’s memories of Brandham Hall fifty years earlier are an infinite source of trouble. Now about sixty-two, he is still trying to understand why. Sometimes Leo is called Mercury or the postman because he’s the go-between surreptitiously delivering...
It’s a tender moment when Helen Shaw and Joel Aaron climb a hill to picnic and enjoy the view. They do not bring food or picnic gear but sit on the rock facing the sun. They are good friends, not lovers, and Aaron soon will be leaving Joel for Israel. Helen...
Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents is a light-hearted comedy about a garment factory in a small town in Iowa. Junction City is a shock to Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent of the Sleep Tite Pajama Company, because he used to be Chicago. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, he...
Rhoda Penmark is a successful serial killer whose career begins at a school picnic. She looks innocent, a darling little girl with blond pigtails and blue eyes. But Rhoda’s interior is ruthless and murderous. Wanting the penmanship medal for herself...
The neat phrase “picnic, lightning” is a metaphor for transience and happenstance written by Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita (1955). Awaiting a murder trial, Humbert begins a memoir, freely admitting moral decline and obsession with the...
Newby’s Picnic At Sakkara is a comic novel set during political and international turmoil in Egypt. At the time of Newby’s action around 1946-47, the British were still in control of the Suez Canal, the Farouk regime was wobbling, and Egyptian nationalism led by the...
The picnic in Dick’s Eye in the Sky is characteristic of his style of mixing shifting planes of reality and illusion, laced with sardonic humor. The picnic takes when the real world collides accidentally with an alternate world it’s the result of an...
