It is a vicious story because human beings are vicious, but it also has the compassion to see the beauty gleaming in the depths of ugliness.
Wiener-Dog, in which, among other things, a sadistic mother tells her small son a vicious story about a rape, is no exception.
The intricately alternating speakers sometimes propel the story forward and at times echo events from a different point of view, but the entire vicious story is described with such immediacy that we forget that we are simply watching three dynamic actors talking.
We should read widely, not merely those sources that confirm our own beliefs, nor should we spread a vicious story about someone whose ideas we dislike without thoroughly researching it.
But rather "the little detective within me" was appalled by the Judas tale, which, Oz says, is a "vicious, ugly story", arresting for being so badly written: had the gospels had a decent editor, he says, it would have been struck out.
You might expect that in an era of relentless 24-hour media coverage and vicious negative campaigning, stories of this kind would be career-ending.
In his acknowledgments, Bell, the author of a widely admired trilogy of novels set during the Haitian revolution, writes that this book is "the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it".
"The Color of Night," by Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage; $15) In his acknowledgments, Bell … writes that this book is "the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it".
Based on Joseph Conrad's very dry, very vicious long short story, "The Return," the film concerns a man (Alvan in the original) who, having married a woman for whom he apparently feels nothing, becomes undone when she leaves him for another.
