That's not chips. I asked for chips. But in these stories there is only a hair's-breadth distance between humor and horror. Bethany remembered hearing that, in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff had stretched out his arms before him like that because the filmmaker had at first wanted to have the monster be blind. She's right, too.
Nobody goes for walks.
The only people who go for walks are old women and men who have been told by their doctors that they have to get more exercise. You can see them, taking their turns around the block every night after supper, looking none too pleased. First of all, the arrogance. It never occurs to anyone that Murdeena has slipped her moorings, perhaps driven over the edge by small-town boredom. A young single woman who teaches English as a second language keenly notices the confusion and adjustment problems of her multicultural students, perhaps because they echo her own dire loneliness and alienation.