There is scarcely any comfort to be found in this book; only an indelible, arcane horror. And Then There Were None wa…There is scarcely any comfort to be found in this book; only an indelible, arcane horror. And Then There Were None was uncomfortable as it lodged itself in the darkest corner of my mind. The questions it asks, the implications it conceals, are soul-curdling and unforgettable. In short, I liked this book, but it's not exactly an experience I’m keen on revisiting.**In Agatha Christie’s nightmarish tableau of a novel, ten people are summoned as house guests to a remote island by a Mr and Mrs U.N. Owen. The guests assembled trade stiff dialogue over dinner and cocktails while musing about the celebrity of the island and puzzling about their hosts’ tardiness. The whimsy of the moment, however, abruptly disappears when a disembodied message blaring from a gramophone tallies, in vivid and mordant detail, the guests' unpunished crimes. What begins as astonishment quickly turns into horror when, shortly after, the house's occupants embark on the ghastly business of being murdered, one by one, per the instructions of a horrid nursery rhyme. Death runs rampant with its bloody scythe on Soldier Island: this is their sentence coming to retrieve them at last. “Be sure thy sin will find thee out.” Agatha Christie, an extraordinarily good writer, digs with bright horrible relish into this exhilarating, unsettling, and brilliantly constructed story. She plays the reader with the delicacy of an expert angler, scarcely allowing us a moment to dig in our heels and stop where we are, just for a while, just long enough to get a better idea of what’s ahead. The experience of reading this novel is, as a result, sometimes akin to walking through a nightmare, unable to orient one's self, understanding very little beyond the deep-seated sense of being utterly afraid. This is intensified by the hermetic …