Tell me about a beginning to a story that you love! Books, tv, movies, whatever! Something that grabbed you and didn't let you go! This can be single lines or whole scenes or whatever!
Some of my favorites:
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“I lost an arm on my last trip home.” The opening page of
Kindred by Octavia Butler, which grabbed me so hard that I read the whole thing in one sitting!
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The Killers (1946). This is a solid noir but the rest of it just does not live up to the opening scene, which contains characters we never see again. We're in a diner in a small town around dinner time, and two strangers walk in...
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Severance episode one. A woman wakes up on a conference table in a windowless conference room. A voice speaks to her over a speaker phone. WTF is going???? Some of the most effective in medias res I've ever seen!
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Till We Have Faces:
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.
Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me.
Goosebumps!
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Spindle's End by Robin McKinley:
The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like sticky plaster-dust. (House-cleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, especially in a cheerful household - magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself -- but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory.)
+ The opening scenes of
Friday Night Lights. Honestly that whole pilot, which is a masterclass all its own. It's Monday morning, and we see the people of Dillon, Texas getting ready for their day. The voice-overs aren't voice-overs: they're the talk radio show where they're talking about the most exciting thing in town: Friday night's high school football game. It's a hell of a way to introduce us to this world and its priorities.
+ The opening scene of
The Hour. Maybe it's just me, but having Ben Whishaw speak directly to the camera and announce, "The newsreels read," is a brilliant way to get me to care about something. Lol
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