I've always been a tad blasé about physical violence and death in my writing. Violence - especially abrupt, over-the-top, unanticipated, undeserved violence - has always been amusing and cathartic to me. I attribute this to three factors.

The first, of course, would be my exposure to mass media, growing up in the eighties and nineties. Young boys, such as myself, were and are expected to revel in thrilling battles and hilarious slapstick in our media, and were and are expected to sit and absorb such material for hours out of every day. Such exposure must, necessarily, establish a few neural pathways.

The second is definitely my complete lack of exposure to actual violence and its consequences in my life. I never fought with my siblings. I never played contact sports or rode bikes. I never got beat up in school (though I certainly richly deserved it). I've managed to make it to thirty years of age without once breaking a bone or requiring stitches.

Oddly enough, I would say the third is my religious upbringing. Specifically, a form of Christianity with an otherworldly, eternal-destination focus. Everyone on the planet is destined to spend eternity - eternity, mind you - in either indescribable bliss or unendurable agony, over little more than a few mumbled phrases and mental adherence to a paragraph's worth of dogma. In the face of such a dichotomy, who could attribute significance about a few trifling inconveniences like an amputated hand, a gouged out eye, or a life cut short by a measly few decades?