Bread Eggs Milk Squick / Literature

• Maddox's The Alphabet of Manliness features this charming gem:
  (On documenting situations where having an erection makes you gay)
  Shopping for a gun: STRAIGHT
  Shopping for a gun with your buddy: STRAIGHT
  Shopping for a gun with your buddy while you hold each others' cocks: GAY
• Appears in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis numerous times, to great comedic and disturbing effect. A fine example:
  Bateman: I've heard of post-California cuisine. In fact, I've eaten it. No baby vegetables? Scallops in burritos? Wasabi crackers? Am I on the right track? And by the way did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Garfield but run over and skinned and then someone threw an ugly Ferragamo sweater over you before they rushed you to the vet? Fusilli? Olive oil on Brie?
• In The Austere Academy Klaus's teacher makes her students measure various "ordinary objects: a frying pan, a picture frame, the skeleton of a cat."
  • Of Cafe Salmonella (a restaurant that serves only salmon dishes), the narrator has this to say: "There's nothing particularly wrong with salmon of course, but, like caramel candy, strawberry yogurt, and liquid carpet cleaner, if you eat too much of it, you are not going to enjoy your meal."
• In Ciaphas Cain: Duty Calls, Cain has to lay out the situation for a panicky civilian quickly and concisely:
  "Ciaphas Cain, regimental commissar, Valhallan 597th. My aide, Jurgen. Terrorist attack."
• In Catalyst, Kate lists her younger brother's hobbies as trombone, soccer and masturbation.
• The The Cattle Raid of Cooley takes a moment to rattle off Cu Chulainn's many talents, topping the quite extensive list off with "laying waste to and plundering the neighbors' border."
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): While the (giant monstrous) ants are on the move through the countryside, Anthony has to field endless questions from Vibrant, who wants him to explain "what a farm is, why they’re necessary, the basic understanding of the human digestive tract, gut bacteria, bacteria in general and what a screaming mob of people running for their lives is."
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, the small children's quarters are furnished with beanbags, puzzles, lock-picking kits, and heavy duty tranquilizers in case any of them start to manifest dangerous superpowers.
• Count and Countess provides this gem:
  The bailey was exquisitely decorated: I had lights all over the brush and lutenists sitting up on the palisades, I had the best of the sweet soups served there on the clothed table, I had my pageboys, five of them, hoisted up on pikes, and yet I was abandoned by all of my companions, even Istvan!
• In Desperation, a state trooper (who turns out to be possessed by Tak) casually inserts the words "I'm going to kill you" into the middle of the Miranda rights he recites to a couple he arrested. And he does just that to the husband several minutes later.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • "I can name at least half a dozen jobs I can never have if I can't grow a beard or a mustache or at least some decent stubble." The jobs Greg lists? Magician, pirate, lumberjack, artist, cop, and... criminal.
  • In one of the books, Rowley brings some home videos and suggests that he and Greg watch some. They're titled "Rowley's 5th Grade Play", "TRIP TO [obscured by the DVD]LIA", and... "Rowley's Birth".
• The special nature-bending libraries of Discworld mean that "the three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality."
  • In The Truth, Sacharissa tells William "There's a man who's lost his watch, there's a troll who wants a job, there's a zombie who wants... well, I can't make out what he wants, and there's a man who doesn't like what you wrote and wants to behead you."
  • Nanny Ogg's Cookbook has an example in the recipe for Peppermint Humbugs from Lord Downey. The last ingredient listed is arsenic. This is followed by a Publisher's Note reminding you which Guild Lord Downey is head of and instructing you to not actually add it. And a Running Gag in the rest of the recipe continuing to remind you, like "Stir quickly, before any arsenic is added" and "Now would be a good time to not add any arsenic."
• Early Riser: The perks of joining the Winter Consul, as listed off by senior Consulate officer Jack Logan during protagonist Charlie's interview for the position of Novice:
  Jack Logan: I need a new Novice with a good memory to train up. Good career path. Exciting too. Lots of challenges. Bit of cash, extra pudding. Medium to high risk of death.
  Charlie Worthing: What was the last bit again?
  Jack Logan: Extra pudding.
  Charlie Worthing: And after that?
  Jack Logan: Coffee and mints?
  Charlie Worthing: I meant on your list.
  Jack Logan: Oh — medium to high risk of death.
• In one chapter of his incomplete autobiography The First Third, Neal Cassady casually relates three episodes from his childhood and the lessons he learned from them. One was about thawing frozen hands with cold water rather than hot, the second was about using the bathroom, and the third was about how he just barely escaped being raped by a strange man on the way home from school by attacking him and running for his life. Much of the book reads like this, actually, with casual unexamined inserts about poverty and abuse slipped in between detailed descriptions of places and people he knew.
• Franny K. Stein:
  • From the book The Fran With Four Brains.
  Some days she was just in the mood to hang around her lab doing regular-kid things, like playing with her toys, or reading books, or bringing a monster to life through the application of a jillion volts of electricity.
  • It is mentioned in The Frandidate that Franny's favorite subjects aside from electric power are chemistry, nuclear power and brain removal.
• Jamaica Kinkaid's poem^note Or whatever. It's one of those. "Girl" has a mother advising her daughter:
  "This is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child"
• In The Girl in 6E, the title character Deanna Madden fills the reader in on the similarities between herself and her mother: "I inherited a lot from my mother, including delicate features, long legs, and dark hair, but the biggest genetic inheritance has been her homicidal tendencies."
• In Haruhi Suzumiya, Ryoko Asakura complains about how Haruhi Suzumiya is not doing anything interesting and talks to Kyon about whether or not it is alright to enact a change to get a result even if it is dangerous right before trying to murder Kyon with a knife just to see how Haruhi would react, all without changing the pitch in her voice.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy:
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts like so:
    At eight o' clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.
  • In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod says that if the brain-scans had revealed why he wanted to be Galactic President, the Council would have kicked him out with "nothing but a fat pension, a secretarial staff, a fleet of ships, and a couple of slit throats!"
  • From Life, the Universe and Everything:
    On the way back (the people of Krikkit) sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.
  • In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Arthur Dent comes home to find piles of junk mail, invitations, letters from friends saying he was never around much anymore, and a dead tabby kitten.
• In Hundreds of Heads's How to Survive Your Freshman Year, a teen self-help guide consisting of words of wisdom from current college students, one piece of advice (likely not condoned by the publisher) reads: "Bring extra lighting for your dorm room, a mattress in case a friend comes over, and a fake I.D."
• The In Death series: Purity in Death artfully describes Asshole Victim Chadwick Fitzhugh like this..."His hobbies were travel, fashion, gambling, and seducing young boys."
• Liv in the Future has a list of rules at a swimming pool Liv visits:
  1. No running
  2. No diving
  3. No breathing
  4. No introducing live sea creatures to the swimming pool ecosystem
  5. No devouring live birds in the deep end (shallow end OK)
  6. No calling your grandmother (I'm sorry, but she doesn't love you as much as you thought she did)
  7. Above all, HAVE FUN! ☺
• From The Meaning of Liff:
  Naction: The 'n' with which cheap advertising copywriters replace the word 'and' (as in 'fish 'n' chips', 'mix 'n' match', 'assault 'n' battery') [....]
• One of the first things we hear about Lisbeth Salander, Anti-Hero of the Millennium Series, is that she was once asked by her boss at the security and investigation company she was working for to prepare a standard report on a researcher for a pharmaceutical company. The report was supposed to take about a week but dragged on for over a month, with her ignoring repeated reminders. She then silently and without warning handed him a report that, without changing tone at all, segued from the usual information about the subject's life and background to the fact that he had visited a child prostitute. She had pictures. And an interview with the girl. According to her boss this wasn't the only case where something similar happened. He really doesn't like the fact that Lisbeth doesn't give warning about what the reports might contain since he sometimes reviews them over dinner.
• In My Name Is Red, an artist rapturously describes the beautiful horse he is drawing and finishes by comparing its rump to "the gentle butt of a boy I was about to violate."
• Near the end of Neogicia, Saly finds two luxury dresses for herself and her roommate/best friend Loreley in her dresser, along with a note from Emperor Keynn Lucans. Saly asks Loreley, who's still lying in bed at that point and can't see the note, to guess who got them the dresses. Loreley's guesses are Saly's mentor, her own mentor and Nox Lucans, Keynn's brother and Psycho Sidekick who has become a Hate Sink by this point of the story. Loreley's logic was that it would be Nox's way to apologize for the act that got him hated by them and audience.
• This trope is the crux of the short story The Man Who Loved Flowers (published in the anthology Night Shift).
• Oh, the Humanity: A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert gets a lot of mileage out of this trope. For example, it lists good places to meet new friends: adult education courses, volunteering, pub crawls, and cults.
• Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith: "On the balcony stood a man. He was a big man, wearing tired jeans and nothing on his feet. His torso was naked except for tiny whorls of hair, and he didn't have a head."
• In Oracle of Tao, the Aiken Monastery is known for its tight security, using not only a lie detector but also a fortuneteller to detect whether new visitors will cause trouble. However, one day their main guard is sick:
  The guards simply stamped our fingerprints, checked our passports, and harvested stem cells from our bone marrow before letting us through. I swear, without her running things, the whole system was pretty lax!
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Battle of the Labyrinth, a classroom full of young telkhines (human/dog/sea lion-hybrid monsters) is treated to an educational movie about telkhine puberty.
  Narrator: As a young sea demon matures, changes happen to the monster's body. You may notice your fangs getting longer and you may have a sudden desire to devour human beings. These changes are perfectly normal and happen to all young monsters.
• The infamous "children's" book Sam and Lucy, starring the two titular dogs:
  Sam and Lucy liked each other a lot. They played tag... they danced... they rolled in the dirt... and they mated.
• Six of Crows: Jan Van Eck's litany of everything he tried to teach his severely dyslexic son Wylan to read ranges from the expected, to the creative, to the horrifying.
  Van Eck: I have hired the best tutors from every corner of the world. I've tried specialists, tonics, beatings, hypnotism.
• In the final novel of the Star Trek: Vanguard series, Cerventes Quinn has been banned from most of Vanguard station's drinking establishments for such offenses as picking fights, failing to pay his tab...and urinating over the bar.
• A Study in Emerald contains a really creepy example. Our protagonist describes the three plays that make up The Strand Players' performance: a wacky Mistaken Identity comedy, a melodrama about a starving urchin who's Too Good for This Sinful Earth, and a historical epic about the Old Ones awakening and conquering humanity, with the human hero welcoming them and beating to death the one man who tries to resist. And the entire audience, including our protagonists, loudly applauds all three. It's this exact moment when you realize how completely alien this Alternate History is.
  • Also by the same author, Only the End of the World Again features an overtly long example. Albeit it's more Bread, Squick, Eggs, Squick, Milk:
    There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two week's rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelation. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she'd thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non-believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she'd thank me if in the future I'd keep to it.
• This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself by David Moser:
  This sentence is telling you that Billy is blond and blue-eyed and American and twelve years old and strangling his mother.
• In Unique Jan's introduction has him waking up, reading a note from his grandmother about taking a ride with her friend needing to be picked up, and getting dressed and making certain he has everything he might need: "Clothes? Check. Good work boots with steel toes? Check. Wallet? Check. Cell phone? Check. Teargas grenade? Check. Silver rings? Check. Knife. Check. Pistol? Check. Keys? Check. That ought to do it."
• In Mark Twain's The War Prayer, the prayer itself starts out like a standard, pious prayer, but quickly goes wrong when the petitioner prays to "help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds". A bit of an inversion, though; although the beginning and end of the prayer are normal, the bulk of it is completely twisted.
• From Will Grayson, Will Grayson:
  anyway, i really need this job, which means i can't do things like yell or pin my stupid name tag upside down or wear jeans that have rips in them or sacrifice puppies in the toy aisle.