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

by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

unrecovered bodies are bodies that can be animated with story.

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.

It should have been dead long ago, she knows, but souls are like livers: they regenerate and regenerate, until you’ve finally poisoned them enough that the only thing they can do is kill you, take you down with them.

“I’m sorry,” she says as best she can, she’s not sure to who. Herself, maybe. The world. Anybody tuned in to her garbled words.

Stories like they’re in, they love crawlspaces.

“You don’t get to pick your genre,” Jennifer fills in. “Unless you’re you,” Letha says.

Virgins can’t die. Their hymens are like armor.”

Instead of coming for her right through the window like she expects, he steps ahead, into the doorless doorway, and Letha pivots around to meet him head-on, because some things you can’t run from, and because this is it, because it’s been too long, because she can’t help it, she screams, her teeth parting for the first time in so long, all her anger pouring out louder and louder, her whole upper body leaning forward, her chin tapping the puffy chest of her jacket she’s pretty sure, an off-putting enough thing that even Dark Mill South stops in his tracks, his eyes widening to take this, whatever it is, in.

Standing in the doorway behind him, a long blue hammer held in both hands at the end of its high swing, blood and long black hair matted on its head, is Jennifer.

If she’d thrown him into a pile of rotting elk, then all of Idaho would burn, of course. But throwing an actual flame into dry wood, with accelerant… it’s guttering out. Because that’s how the world is.

Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl.

The avalanche was demonstrating once again that nature is an Etch A Sketch, and sometimes it must get shaken in order to start things over.

“I know the genre,”

Be careful what you wish for. It’s something you learn the hard way.

It’s time for the big showdown. Between a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl and a monster of a man.

that wicked little scythe curving up from his right hand like the worst, best erection.

“But you’re a slasher!” Jade yells across to him, like she’s talking up to the screen in a movie theater.

Behind the wheel is Deputy Banner fucking Tompkins,

because that holy choir down in Drown Town, it needs a baritone after all these years.

He just tilted against a dumptruck, and won.

It’ll be what all the survivors are wearing this post-massacre season.

so Jade steels herself like she always has, like the final girl she is, and she keeps walking.

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.