Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

WE HAD A NEW MONSTER every night.

First line

I also still believe that books operate along the same principles as enchanted wardrobes. You climb into that little space and come out the other side in a vast and secret world, a place both more frightening and more wonderful than your own.

In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.

For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.

It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”

The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.