Short Fiction · Chapter
Coming Attraction explained
An Englishman visiting a post-apocalyptic New York rescues a masked woman from a murder attempt by three men in a coupe.
What happens
An Englishman visiting a post-apocalyptic New York rescues a masked woman from a murder attempt by three men in a coupe. She invites him to her apartment, but during a cab ride she evades his questions and slaps his hand when he tries to remove her mask. After bribing the police to avoid being held as a witness, he reflects on the American masking culture and its sexual implications.
Themes in this chapter
Identity and Illusion
The masked girl's hidden identity and the narrator's inability to see her face reflect the theme of illusion and the mystery of self-presentation.
Violence and Survival
The attempted murder by the coupe with fishhooks, the narrator's quick reflexes, and the casual police attitude toward skirt-snagging highlight a violent, survivalist society.
Alienation and Otherness
The English narrator feels alienated by American customs, especially masking, and the deformed beggars emphasize societal otherness.
Characters to notice
- Jack Barry
The English narrator who rescues the masked girl and later meets her for a date.
- Effie
The masked girl rescued by Jack; she wears a gray velvet mask and silver nail caps, and is evasive about her identity.
Key passages
“I picked up was the standard hard-boiled detective story in which two female murderers go gunning for each other.”
The narrator was reading a typical detective novel about two female killers targeting each other.
Sets the tone of violence and gender dynamics.
“I don’t object to ordinary wrestling matches, though they bore me, but I simply detest watching a man wrestle a woman.”
The narrator finds male-female wrestling distasteful, even though he is indifferent to regular wrestling.
Reflects his discomfort with the sexualized violence in American entertainment.
“Since the female face and form have been banned on American signs, the very letters of the advertiser’s alphabet have begun to crawl with sex”
Because women's faces and bodies are prohibited in advertisements, the shapes of letters themselves have become sexually suggestive.
Highlights the ironic sexualization caused by masking culture.