From the book, then the movie, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," by Carson McCULLERS - far under rated gems. Went back to check many years later and it wasn't the *opening* line, but close. And I digress from the "dark and stormy" parody theme, since "fort in the South" is no parody.
************QUOTE*******
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1245-reflections-in-a-golden-eye-a-hothouse-tale-of-desire-and-simmering-violence/
Reflections in a Golden Eye: a “hothouse tale” of desire and simmering violence
.... Nothing human was alien to Carson McCullers, and in 1967 her work found ideal interpreters in the “superb reader” John Huston, a fearless Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando, whose philosophy of acting matched her philosophy of writing.
.... “When I write about a thief,” she once said, “I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’” Twenty years earlier, in 1939, she had dreamed up the sad story of repressed Captain Weldon Penderton and written it in a rush; according to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, she polished it off in a couple of months. She first called her short novel Army Post, and then, a little less drably, Reflections in a Golden Eye. “An army post in peacetime is a dull place,” it begins, but only a few sentences later, in the same calm tone, it tells us:
“There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” And then, “The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.” These are the dramatis personae, the characters she’ll become. Even the horse. ....
********UNQUOTE********
= new reply since forum marked as read