Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [662]

“I don’t know. They’re crazy. I heard some of them used to be rich kids, so I don’t know why they hate rich people so much. That drug is bad, though. Sometimes the paints like the fire so much they get too close to it. Then their friends don’t even help him. They just watch them burn. It’s like… I don’t know, it’s like they were fucking the fire, and like it was the best fuck they ever had.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 662

Note

The register does all the work here: the Paints are described entirely through a teenager’s halting, unliterary groping for a simile, and the simile lands harder for the awkwardness. The dropped grammar (‘don’t even help him’, pronoun flipping between them/him) is the speech of someone half-fascinated and half-repelled, and the fire-as-lover figure is the book’s cleanest image of pyromaniac self-annihilation as a kind of ecstasy.