Don't think you could get published?

I bet you could! This was not only in a book I'm reading, but it appeared as part of the inside-cover excerpt that's supposed to entice people to buy the book:

It pierced his sleep like a psychopath's knife; it peeled it away from him layer by layer, as if it were an onion . . . or layers of flesh. He tried, instinctively, to run further into the safety of his dreams, applying for asylum in that country we visit in sleep.

His application was denied.

I just love strings of similes followed by hamfisted metaphors about the immigration system.

Presumably "it" was a scary noise of some sort -- I haven't gotten that far in the book yet. Without dwelling too long on the potential ambiguity of the fourth "it" in this excerpt -- is sleep the onion, or is the noise? -- my purpose was to show you that this writing was good enough for Zebra Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp. So surely any one of us could produce something publishable.

But not under our real names, of course. Dibs on Gertrude Perkins.