“A big pair of garden shears sat on the counter, as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun on the mantel.”

Why is it great? Even without context, this line is tremendous. Playfully riffing off Chekhov’s rule that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it absolutely must go off by the third, Solomon transforms a prosaic garden implement into something ominous, sinister. But with context, watch out: The sentence comes deep in Solomon’s piece on a veterinary pathologist in Alaska who spends her days hacking up the bodies of diseased wild animals. We’ve already witnessed autopsies of the cuddly-meets-macabre variety, and this line catapults us into Coen-Brothers-circa-“Fargo” territory: funny and queasy-making at the same time.