The Forest of Lost Souls

by Dean Koontz

Life always eventually offers us a lamp to press back the darkness humanity brought into it so very long ago, a lamp if we are able to see it and seize it; so said her uncle, who had seined her from the sediment of the city.

“You think everything’s fine, moving along nice and comfortable, then something happens and you see the truth, and you don’t even recognize where you are.”

most people will still believe what isn’t true, because the truth is heavy to carry compared to the lightness of a lie.

When I came home from the war, most of the light had gone out of me. I was a house of empty rooms—and over two years, she furnished them.”

“It is sad to say that my people, not just Cheyennes, but those of all the ancient nations, have long forgotten or ceased to care about this place. They build casinos. They TikTok and tweet and lose themselves in the forests of YouTube. They learn only what Google allows them to know, and year by year the past becomes to them less than it really was. The past was real, I think more real than the present. These days, so many are educated into ignorance, entertained by shallow amusements that drain from them the very substance of themselves, until they seem to have become ghosts long, long before their deaths. I’m only thirty-four, but out there in the world that Two Moon and I have left, I feel like a cranky granddam who has lived a century and sees the newer generations living for nothing but oblivion. Only deep in the forest do I feel young and hopeful.”

the forest is a place of solace and succor where she is welcome because she has knowledge of—and deep respect for—its ways. In her experience, it is civilization, riven by human arrogance and greed and envy, that is, at its worst, a forest of lost souls.