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

As Martin Luther says on that poster by your chalkboard, “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” Our wheels are moving just fine, thank you. Just, don’t look in the rearview mirror if you can help it.

It’s stupid being superstitious like that, he knows, but if you don’t have private little rituals, the days can lose their meaning real fast.

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?

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.

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

The Guard never flinches, never reacts. His post might be ceremonial, his rifle not loaded, but still, he’s above all this.

“It’s just… you’re watching them to say you’re sorry, for not listening to me back then. But you can stop now, okay? Apology accepted. I wouldn’t have listened to me either.”

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

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.

She would still smile back at him, she knows. Just for that one perfect day in the future, of hanging bedsheets out on the line. For a perfect little girl, clinging to her leg.

He’s not following any of the rules, is he?

in real life, you don’t just push the slasher over the edge, into death. In real life, he stabs a hand back up, takes you with him.

and breathes all the corruption in her lungs out. Well, not the blackness, she supposes. Not the horror. Never that.

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