It was somewhere in between, a state that mostly consisted of waiting for the world to deal out its next brutal shock.

To Nick, Margo's influence on his father had been a brutal shock.

He opened his eyes but the light was a brutal shock, with a hard yellow-green underglow, and he shut them again.

My body can still feel the brutal shock of being run into several of the concrete pillars in the low-roofed basement.

Their capture had been a brutal shock, stunning and confusing in its unexpectedness, but they had absorbed it now.

Perhaps they monitored this, because they promptly woke him up with a brutal electric shock across the metal floor where Jerry was lying.

So of course it comes as a brutal shock when women of a certain age, no matter how youthful looking, find biology has betrayed their expectations.

Once she does, she's hit with several brutal shocks.

And her mother's murder had been far more brutal a shock.

As always in the Union, we will find the appropriate transitional solutions that enable us to avoid excessively brutal shocks.