'The opening sentence of the first short story Elizabeth Harrower ever completed 3 plunges the reader into a dramatic meteorological event:
And then, as if the lightning that ripped the sky apart wasn’t enough, the lights round the edge of the swimming pool, and even the three big ones sunk into it on cement piles, went out. At once the solid blackness rang with shrieks and laughter; only Janet was struck dumb to find that she had been obliterated. It was like nothing so much as that astronomical darkness into which she had been plunged last year when they took out her tonsils. (Introduction)
Epigraph: And the weather seems menacing. —Elizabeth Harrower, “The Cost of Things”
I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud ‒ man. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra