frumphd..The Believer - The Bad Mormon
The language of Dark Property is everywhere as alien—and alienating—as its landscape, its syntax as tortured, its vocabulary as odd. Evenson digs up obscure and obsolete terms, employs them rather naughtily (using verbs as adjectives, nouns as verbs), and sprinkles them throughout. Thus despite the boy’s frement, he is strampled, his body flitched and flenched. Unforgettably, the book’s one love scene goes like this: “She neither regarded his face nor chose to squirm under him. Their swollen scugs tottered the walls, gave utterance in dark tongues that mocked all flesh.” (Scugs, by the by, are shadows, and also squirrels.)