As the once adorable creature becomes ever larger, the tale turns unsettling, tapping as it does into childhood fears of a loss of self-control and of the inability to make proper use of the growing powers that small children feel welling up inside them.
People were, she says, behaving like tourists, taking photographs of themselves in the remains: "I felt the most powerful curiosity I have felt in my life". Around her, people gathered inconsequential belongings – a broken picture frame, a gas cylinder, a sweater – and it was this, in the end, that turned the unsettling cheer into anger.
As the trio's relationship presses to its disastrous conclusion, she succeeds in turning an unsettling tale into an exploration of the global politics of desire.
However, Splice failed to connect with the wider audience – despite the best efforts of its producer Guillermo del Toro, a man well used to turning dark, unsettling concepts into commercially viable prospects.
By turns hilarious, unsettling, and brilliant, the play blurs the distinction between the natural and the civilized: it's a model of the grotesque, which Edgar Allan Poe once described as "much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible and not a little of that which might have excited disgust".
In 2010, Penguin published 10 central European classics, including a 1957 collection of stories, The Elephant, by Mrozek; reviewing this volume in the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard said he was delighted by a series of absurdist parables that were "by turns hilarious, unsettling and enigmatic".
But the agency's subsequent examinations of ATK's flare program turned up more unsettling information, according to court documents.
On Friday, as the photograph circulated widely, the couple turned into an unsettling symbol of Islamic militancy in Russia — deeply repugnant to most people but also likely to be embraced by other extremists as a propaganda coup, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde of the insurgency.
This has become unsettling.
The scandal surrounding the resignation of former CIA director David Petraeus has turned from a merely unsettling news development into a bizarre and tawdry soap-operatic spectacle that has even the writers of Law & Order: SVU agog.
