15 More Novel Recommendations Using Only the First Line of the Book
Opening Lines Still Set the Tone
Two months ago, I wrote an article titled “15 Novel Recommendations Using Only the First Line of the Book.” This was supposed to be the first in a two-part series (30 titles at once seeming a little overwhelming), but somehow Part Two got lost in the shuffle. In the spirit of better late than never, this is, finally, the second part of the series.
I said in that earlier piece that authors and publishers spend a vast amount of time and energy creating a blurb for the jacket or back cover of a novel in order to get you interested enough to buy it. There are literally millions of books published every year and getting noticed in such a crowd is no easy feat. But perhaps they are making things harder than they have to be.
My premise in the earlier article was that since the opening line of a novel sets the tone for the entire book, what if you used nothing but the opening line to promote it? Could that work? Are there any that are interesting enough to make you read any further, let alone buy the thing? Well, I obviously found 15 that I believed would, and now I have 15 more.
So, once again with no hype and no fancy marketing buzzwords, here are fifteen sentences the author considered important enough to place first in their labor of love. The most interesting thing, to me at least, about this list of great opening lines is that at least ten of the fifteen fall in or near the horror genre. Is it a coincidence, or are horror writers especially adept at grabbing our attention from the outset?
Let me know which ones stood out to you, and feel free to add your own favorite opening lines in the comments section.
1. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” — Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
2. “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” — Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
3. “The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.” — Stephen King, It
4. “The exorcist is dead.” — Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend’s Exorcism
5. “If my sister Alma had lived, I should never have begun the seances.” — John Harwood, The Seance
6. “Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.” — David Wong, John Dies at the End
7. “I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father.” — John Boyne, This House is Haunted
8. “It was a cool, quiet day in San Francisco and Alphonse Rivera, a lean, dark man of fifty sat behind the counter of his bookstore flipping through the Great Big Book of Death.” — Christopher Moore, Secondhand Souls
9. “I’m thinking of ending things.” — Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
10. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
11. “When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.” — Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead
12. “They had made a movie about us.” — Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
13. “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
14. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
15. “Marina once told me that we only remember what never really happened.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Marina
