The Boxes | Literary Qualities

The Boxes Literary Qualities

Sleator's ability to create amazing scenes is itself amazing. With words alone, he can transport his audience into wondrous situations: The grid of yesterday must have merely been scaffolding. The building now revealed was far more complex. It was entirely glittering black—the creatures could not perceive color, after all. But clearly their sonar made them aware of the shape of things. Sharp conical spires spiked around the steeply sloped roof, and beneath these were colonnaded hallways, small and simple at the top—for the lower classes, I imagined—and growing more spacious and ornate as rampways, first narrow, then wider, descended toward the bottom. The two lower stories were elaborately carved with statues of monstrous creatures, not like anything on earth—many-limbed, with fangs and claws. The statues looked nothing like the creatures who had built this palace in my basement. In the middle of the structure a large arched opening rose from...
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