The books and short stories “The Night Circus”, “The Devil and Tom Walker”, “The Black Cat”, and “A Rose for Emily”. A common theme between “The Night Circus” and “The Black Cat” is violence. In “The Night Circus”, Prospero is malicious and cruel to his daughter and on one occasion “lifts a heavy and glass paperweight and brings it down on her hand, hard enough to break her wrist with a sharp crack” (Morgenstern 50). Savagery is also used in “The Black Cat” when the Narrator tries to kill cat but instead “buries the axe in [his wife’s] brain” (Poe 4). Prospero’s brutality towards his daughter displays the theme of violence. Comparably, the Narrator’s treatment of the cat and his wife also showcases the similarity of violence between the books. The book “The Night Circus” and the short story “A Rose for Emily” both share an element of grotesqueness. In “The Night Circus”, Prospero, trying to strengthen his daughter’s magical abilities, “uses a pocket knife to slit his daughter’s fingertips open, one by one, watching wordlessly as she cries” (Morgenstern 50). In “A Rose for Emily”, Emily had kept “what was left of [Homer], rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay” (Faulkner 1074). The diction used in “The Night…show more content… In the book “The Night Circus”, Celia manipulates a teacup and “cracks tremble across the glaze, and then it collapses in shards of flowered porcelain” (Morgenstern 11). In like manner, The Devil in “The Devil and Tom Walker” leaves “the black print of a finger burnt, as it were, into [Tom Walker’s] forehead, which nothing could obliterate” (Irving 326). Celia is able to influence the teacup without touching it due to her magic abilities, something a normal person would be unable to do. The Devil casts a mysterious marking on Tom’s forehead as his signature to prove that he is not a human, but a
