And the dramatic structure of the book is Shakespearean in another way: there is a typically Shakespearean penultimate act in which the main characters retire from the stage to rest up for a final, bravura entrance and the climactic sword fight. One of the most impressive formal devices occurs in this hiatus, with the use of the aforementioned radio-casts. A horrendous catalogue of mass-murders is coming to us in a series of parodistic news bulletins that punctuate the chapter’s foreground action. They have all the hysterical piety of the small-town media faced with a shattering horror, effective enough as set pieces (and the only example of a really contrasting diction); but Delany turns them to far more complicated ends. The crimes are bringing one of our monsters closer and closer to the Crawhole docks (where the narrator has been sold[!] as a waterfront catamite). The last crime is committed on a barge just the other side of the bushes where (and while) the narrator is being buggered by the two scow owners and one of the dockside police. Minutes after the shots and screams, when we burst from the bushes ready to face the reality of the horrors that have been tantalizing us till now with their approach, we find ourselves, instead, face to face with the radio crew and their mobile van, embarking on their own On-The-Spot coverage, so that this crime is given us as a bizarre fugue, both live and (after a thirty second delay) on the police car radio speaker. This would be an impressive enough cadenza, but Delany goes a step further. He manages to give us the whole anti-world of the novel in miniature with the director, the announcer, and the various assistants. Among them, indeed, you will find Delany’s most subtly drawn, ob-skene monster, the absent program producer Martin Sells, who is apparently the guiding force behind the station policy of poshlust and sensational, kitschy sentimentality. Sells’ characterization is completed a chapter later in one cutting stroke (in the scene mentioned with Harkner, naked, in the truck), when, in the last radio report, we are told that Sells has been “on the phone long distance” with the officers of the Womack County Correctional Institute for Boys “… to find out for you …” what sort of boy Harkner “… really is.” The other extremely effective thing that comes out of the brief appearance of the radio crew is the moving encounter between the young black girl, Honey-Pie, and the radio director, which supplies us the reading for the final exchange between the narrator and Hogg—the reading that, more than anything else, is responsible for the significant horror I spoke of before, and that creates the book’s final, overwhelming effect.