is it horrible to say that I like her rape scene?

I'm at the rape scene in _Hush_ and must decide what to make of it. Today is also the date of Karla Homolka's release from prison and her moving into a neighborhood that's a bus ride away from my place. What with my work, newspaper headlines and my own curiosity (or web-surfing procrastination, as you wish), my head is now filled with rape.

The first time I read the rape scene in _Hush_ I was... confused? It seemed to happen so un-expectantly. Out of nowhere. And I couldn't make it out. Who? Where exactly? Why? Just 'cause they're a bunch of hicks? That and her words that pop out of the text, incomprehensible though they seem to be hiding some special meaning: macadam, jimmies, slough. So English-English and incomprehensible to eyes accustomed to a watered-down version of plain English. But it's more than just the words.

walking after midnight, searching for you

Time caught in a song. The words of it dragged out in the drops of rain. Not seeing straight because of it, and maybe not hearing straight. Violence - voler/violer - forced on your body while the mind tries to make sense of it.

Lianne mentioned in class that Roses stages her own rape, and so confuses normative narrative causality. Yet reading this passage over again, I'm not so sure of that. She wishes she had her skinned-rabbit dress on so that she may shame them once gone, but wouldn't that simply be to make something useful, even educational, of the violence inflicted on her body? Like an after-thought of it. Roses knows she could've avoided the rape. Those 'jimmies' could've turned on the lineman if she would've played her silence well. But she couldn't swallow her anger. At least, she couldn't swallow it on time. That's what led them on. Like fire feeding fire.

Recounting another narrative to Ben of Karla's crimes, he interrupts me to say that he really doesn't care about her and that he doesn't understand it/them/that anyways.
"And with Patsy singing so loud she can only see their lips moving, can't hear what they say. No, she is deaf. There is her, and Patsy singing, and she'd be moving her lips to the song, maybe, but for the pull at the roots of her hair, his fist coiled in her hair and pulling her at him, like that. But that's okay, she says. She's just wishing she'd worn the dress she'd worn for Junior, the one that skins her open that way, so that she could shame them gone" (Stone, 132-33).
It's that "but that's OK" that struck me when I first read this passage, precisely because I understood the it, them and that, and the "but that's okay" said (maybe even repeated) to convince, to render banal.

Steve is working on prison writing. Working like a madman to get his Phd thesis finished this summer. And now I understand how mad he might be becoming, because I really wouldn't want to stay in this place for months on end. Her rape scene is frightfully precise, which makes for beautiful writing, but I wouldn't want to stay in it for months.