The Talisman (The Talisman, #1)

by Stephen King

Again, and uncomfortably, Jack had his old sense of being directed, of being manipulated: as if a long invisible wire had pulled himself and his mother up to this abandoned place by the sea. They had wanted him here, whoever they were.

and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.

‘I slapped you. That’s what you’re supposed to do with hysterical people.’

‘Well, I’ll be double-damned,’ Jack said, smiling.

Then Richard fell on his knees with his hair in his tired face, and Jack got down there with him, and I can bear to tell you no more – only that they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.

The architectural extravagance of the black hotel, all the turrets and brass weathervanes attached to fluted towers, the cupolas and gambrels which should have made it a playful fantasy, instead made it menacing, nightmarish. It looked as though it belonged in some kind of anti-Disneyland where Donald Duck had strangled Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Mickey shot Minnie Mouse full of heroin.

you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up