“After the nice place is a more evil place, a desert filled with caves and creepy black mansions. It is filled with ghosts, trolls, evil wizards and witches, pirates living in the murky waters, and terrible traps and poisonous creepy crawlers everywhere.

This blood, I am informed, saved him many lammings from the head of the house, who, though Keeper of the Fives, fainted at first sight of it […]

The image he projects seems at home here in Iowa: the straight-shooter, the truth-teller, the unadorned Kansan from the prairie.

How can such a head not tempt him tonguely? And so he tastes it; […]