Strike-out
"You're getting a cellmate roomate," they said to me.
"We hope you rot to death in this place For good behavior," they said to me.
"Another psycho just like you No more isolation," they said to me.
(Shatter Me, Mafi, page 1)
There is a traditional meaning of strikeout: When you were writing on paper and changed your mind and literally crossed out the part you didn't want. There's no reason for that in computers or books, but there is a modern meaning, to indicate what has been removed from an evolving document.
Mafi doesn't use strike-out in those ways. Mafi's usage is different, even if it's hard to say exactly what that new usage is. One is that people are covering up the truth. The strikeout shows what is being covered up. Or, the strikeout shows what the guards were thinking.
Note that this is first-person present. In what sense can heard speech be crossed out?
In narration:
Not me. Not something someone like me.
Again, hard to characterize.
The effect was very powerful. It's hard for me to imagine this being in every book; I can imagine some author's using it to help create a character.
Ironically, strike-out also appears on the cover, and it's usage looks traditional to me. It ends up being a nice contrast (though surely not meant that way).
MY TOUCH IS LETHAL MY TOUCH IS POWER
Amateurish.
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