Books of Blood: Volume 3 (Books of Blood #3)

by Clive Barker

Eagle-eye went down as if he’d just remembered an appointment with the ground,

It was safer inside than out: that was the first lesson any newborn kid got slapped into him.

worship of God instead of Garbo.

Ricky tasted something he hadn’t experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity.

There was no Cassandra amongst them,

Regret was a luxury reserved for the living, who still had the time, the breath and the energy to act.

Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder.

maybe the dead didn’t like games. Games are about gambles, and the dead had already lost. Maybe the dead act only with the arid certainty of mathematicians.

Tonight he needed a fix of affection.

he was a catalogue of fidgets.

You’re living in the real world, his head said (it was a revelation), and if you’re not very careful you’re going to die there.

the beating of a fist against a wall. Or worse, the sudden fury of a woken heart.

He’d rapidly come to loathe that sticky adoration that went bad as quickly as milk, and stank to high Heaven once it had.

“It’s a sickness,” Reynolds replied. “Needing to live in the past.”

Their eagerness to get somewhere, to arrive at a place they would presently be itching to depart from again, was comical.