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

by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade pulls Letha closer, tries to take all those icy daggers herself, and for the thousandth time she wonders how the old-time Blackfeet did it. Them and all the other Indians back then. Before Gore-Tex, before car heaters, before bags of beef jerky. On a day like this? 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, that’s just it, isn’t it? They were plural, not singular, that’s where horror movies have it all wrong, that’s where the slasher lies: it’s not about a lone girl carving her way to daylight, is it? It’s about two girls making it across the ice together. It’s not fifty thousand ancestors in a single-file line, it’s clumps of survivors fighting off saber tooth cats and dire wolves and other clumps of people. It’s about putting the children and the old people in the middle and then making a circle around them, pointing out with every spear and shaking your head no, saying not this day. Not this day.