The Colonel By Forche Summary

“The Colonel” written by Carly Forche is a short story written about the horrifying experience of meeting the ominous Colonel and being inside of his legendary house of horrors. Forche begins the story with the phrase “What you’ve heard it true”. This opening statement works as an effective hook because it makes the reader ask questions such as “what am I supposed to have heard?”. A hook that makes the audience want to explore the rest of a piece is an important part of having good and effective energy. In addition to the hook, the entire short story is full of energy. Forche uses many of the elements of an energetic story such as exciting verbs, leaping by leaving out information to let the reader fill it in and in-depth descriptions of his surrounding setting and characters. The word choice, especially the verbs, used by Forche gave the short story a lot of energy. One of the most powerful sentences in “The Colonel” is “There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him”. The sentence starts off by describing normal everyday items such as a newspaper and a dog and then takes a sharp turn when the reader realizes
After reading in a few more times to get a better understanding of the plot, I realized that the short sentences were supposed to give a realistic perspective of the horrors that live in the Colonel’s house. People naturally have short attention spans and when they are scanning a room, they look at things for just a second before moving on to the next thing. Another concept Forcche added to her piece relating to pace, is leaping. At the end of the story she describes the severed ears but doesn’t say where they came from and why a man would have a bag of human ears in the first place. Forche purposely left out information so that the reader could fill in the blanks and come up with their own stories or