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

by Stephen Graham Jones

chuckles, I pronounce his name Yeets, not “Yates.” Jill—you probably don’t remember this—instead of telling me to get my greasy head off your clean chalkboard, you just grinned to get your words right and said you’re pretty sure it’s pronounced the other way, Stephen, but, yes, it does look like “Yeets,” and so, instead of walking out again, back to where I belong, I stick with this whole reading and writing thing until I’ve got my PhD like you, and am here, doing this, even using Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—the poem I was halfway citing in workshop that day, via The Police—in this novel about a girl with a heart bigger than her body. Thank you, Jill. And thank you to my next writing teacher, William J. Cobb, for telling me about this new novel he’d just reviewed, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, which stuck with me enough that I named a background character “Galatea” in Chainsaw, and then, when I needed someone to write essays for Reaper—here she was, raising her hand politely but insistently, telling me, like that guy at the end of Hoosiers, that she’s got this, Coach.