Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen Graham Jones

She’s still in there, all right. Somewhere. Under everything that’s happened to her, everything that’s been piled onto her. Everything she’s still carrying, or trying to.

Hardy bundles up, offers his scarf to Jennifer, and then he’s reaching his walker out along the dam’s icy backbone and pulling himself to it, the girl’s hands holding tight to the back of his jacket, and he kind of suspects that, with her letting him lead her like that, and take the brunt of the wind, he could maybe walk across all of Idaho.

John W. Gardner says that History never looks like history when you’re living through it, yes. What does it look like when you can’t stop living through it, though? When it’s not even history to you yet? The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, yes, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Aldous Huxley warns, That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

As Karl Marx says, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is to say: all these episodes of violence eventually become cartoons. Time mollifies, multiple tellings codify, and then history repackages.

In hindsight, it was a stupid decision, but being smart’s not as easy as everybody makes it out to be.

No reason for it to live forever. Just let it be the beautiful terrible thing it is, and then keep moving, keep moving. That’s what Jennifer’s doing.

One thing about Idaho: it don’t look good if it’s not riddled with bullet holes.

Every day, wouldn’t have it just been easier to die? Except—they didn’t. They pushed through. They insisted. They fought. Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl.

But she can’t get mired down in the past. Turn your head behind long enough, it’ll get lopped by what’s rising up in front of you.

She’s just a dead kid, though. Another dead young woman, all her promise leaking into the snow, all her plans pooling in the skin of her back.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis in a rhythm Jade can almost clock, and he keeps on saying it, but the words are hardly making it past his lips now. All Jade can tell of them, it’s that it’s an apology. The kind you make when you’re… afraid? Of dying?

Jade breathes in deep, and it’s cold enough to burn her lungs but that doesn’t matter, she can’t quit pulling more and more in. It’s the best thing ever and also the worst.

When she thrusts her right arm up in victory, what she’s holding there for all the gods to see, for the whole world to know, for you to never have in your sacred collection, it’s a hook. From the killer she killed. Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.