First Lines Survey...

[savageseraph]

This one has been making the rounds, though I read it most recently here cinzia and here gotham_syren. I've so many books lying around and sitting on shelves picking ten was the tough part, though I tended to grab some of the ones closest to me.



"The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning."
Clive Barker Abarat

"I vividly recall my mother's blood."
James Reese The Book of Shadows

"The first time I saw him he hung screaming in the clutch of two white-sheathed knights."
Storm Constantine The Thorn Boy

"At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels according to a formula developed through market research."
Lewis Hyde The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

"If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teeny-bopper sister."
Francesca Lia Block I Was a Teenage Fairy

"The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself."
Neil Gaiman Neverwhere

"In her first anthology of fairy tales, Angela Carter included a story from Kenya: while a poor man's wife in the village thrives, the Sultana in the palace grows thinner and scrappier by the minute."
Maria Warner From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers

"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."
Shirely Jackson The Haunting of Hill House

"Dante stared and stared at the corpse, but a blindness waited behind his eyes."
Sean Stewart Resurrection Man

"The mermaid rose out of deep water into the stormheart."
Jan Siegel Prospero's Children

Comments

[gotham-syren.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm quite fascinated by your list. Must look some of them up. No fair, though - my books are scattered around the house, not necessarily by my desk. On second thought, who am I kidding. I have book envy. ;)