William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

I consider myself a horror flick fanatic. Everything from Nosferatu to the Grindhouse films. Highly rated horror-shows to those B movies not worth the celluloid they were filmed on. I love horror. It therefore came to me as a huge shock when I found myself too scared to keep my eyes open while reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. This book is intense!

If you have not read Lord of the Flies since you were in middle school,  hop from this screen, head down to your used bookseller and dig until you find a harrowing face covered in mud and leaves. Right now. Go find this book. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

See the fella on the cover? That’s Roger, he’s the main character of the story and ironically the only bit of good that comes out alive in this book. Lord of the Flies is about the truth of humanity at its rawest. Golding takes the most pure of souls, children, and deserts them on an uninhabited island to fend for themselves and try to find rescue. The pressure is obviously too much ( as one could probably postulate before chapter 2) and the boys degenerate slowly at first, forming warring tribes. Once the loony Simon finally looses it completely we see both the evolution of evil and the regression of sanity. The reader is shown that with darkness comes confusion and death.

I especially enjoyed (and was freaked out by) the image of a dead hogs head on a stick, right when Simon looses it. The dialogue Simon has with the pig is so grotesque and morbid it dropkicks you in the stomach, leaving you retching and recoiling. A confused boy having a conversation with the face of evil. Awful and twisted in my opinion. To prove this point, I include a paragraph from the chapter.

“Simon looked up, feeling the weight of his wet hair, and gazed at the sky. Up there, for once, were clouds, great bulging towers that sprouted away over the island, gray and cream and copper-colored. The clouds were sitting on the land; they squeezed, produced moment by moment this close, tormenting heat. Even the butterflies deserted the open space where the obscene thing grinned and dripped. Simon lowered his head, carefully keeping his eyes shut, then sheltered them with his hand. There were no shadows under the trees but everywhere a pearly stillness, so that what was real seemed illusive and without definition. The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon.  Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood—and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition.”

The ending is wonderfully done, coming to a finish with the speed and eloquence of the rest of the pages. I always hate it when you’ve read the end of the story  in a  book and then the author continues on for another 5 pages. This book is a thin one, will take an average reader about 3 or 4 hours I suppose, so take my advice, get this book and read it. Your brain will thank you. Your bladder will not.

I suggest to you this: Don’t read this book alone.

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Capricorn Books; Later printing edition (January 1, 1959)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000CDH2XS
• Amazon Link