She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, and reported the following:
The first full sentence at the top of page 99 of Secrets of the Killing State is this: “To borrow from one executioner’s articulation of the point, ‘Shit does happen.’ Yes, yes it does, and here are the reasons why.”Visit Corinna Lain's website.
Whoa. That’s an A+ on the Page 99 Test!
On page 99, I’m introducing the topic of Chapter 4—“An Exceedingly Delicate, Error-Prone Procedure.” Turns out, lethal injection is hard (as in really hard) to do. Lethal injection retains the delicacy of a medical procedure, with its demand for precision and attention to detail, but adds some things and takes away others, resulting in a Frankenstein version of the medical model. The result is an exceedingly delicate procedure that is also exceedingly error prone. In this chapter, I walk through each step of the procedure and talk about all the ways that lethal injection can, and does, go wrong. Hence the line: “‘shit does happen.’ Yes, yes it does and here are the reasons why.”
But that line is also a great snapshot of the entire book. Note that Ford Madox Ford said that if we turn to page 99 and read, “the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Not necessarily the big idea—though here, it happens to work on that level too—but the quality of the whole.
What is Secrets of the Killing State like? It’s a tell-all, so lots of tea spilled. It’s a little irreverent and often quotes an executioner or state official’s own words to make a point. And it uses levity in the writing style to make reading about executions just a tad less heavy. By reading a single line on page 99—an executioner saying “shit does happen” when asked about botched executions—a reader can get an accurate idea of the feel of what they’re going to get in this book. Hat’s off to Ford Madox Ford!
--Marshal Zeringue
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