When Ed Gentry, the narrator of James Dickey's Deliverance, stands over the corpse of the man he has killed with a bow and arrow, he waits for an impulse. "It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him." The impulse does not come, "but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife." Ed dispels this horror by singing a popular song. Then, "I finished, and I was withdrawn from." The horror leaves him, and he returns to the practical problem of survival.

The horror, the release of bestiality in a man whose survival is threatened by the bestiality in others, has been noted by several...