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

by Stephen Graham Jones

The killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male. —CAROL J. CLOVER

Old men don’t have to figure shit out. They just have to sit on a bench in the bitter cold and smoke their death sticks, and consider the white form taking shape out on the ice.

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.

GIRL PREACH

But, pre-death? “That’s just life, girl,” she mumbles in the cage of her teeth.

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.

What she remembered was summer, inexactly: a feeling of being released from time, of days melting into days, until a whole series of them behind her could just be “then,” “before,” with more to come, and a grinning impulse to rush into them with her arms and her eyes and her heart wide open.

Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.

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