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

by Stephen Graham Jones

It was like the West was calling him back. Like the land needed a cleansing agent to rove across the landscape, blood swelling up from each of his boot prints, his shadow so long and so deep that last cries whispered up from it. Or so someone might say who believed in slashers and final girls, fate and justice. But we’ll be getting to her later.

Our wheels are moving just fine, thank you. Just, don’t look in the rearview mirror if you can help it.

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? The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, yes, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Would that Ginger Baker weren’t caught in that tide. Would that her innocence hadn’t been drowned. “But this,” the girl Jennifer Daniels had been in high school would have said, “this is how it works, in a slasher cycle.” Just, never mind all the people who have to die along the way.

And, “Founders,” seriously? Jennifer hasn’t thought that word in… god, how long? And, what, did they write the Constitution? Lay down the Oregon Trail? Drive the last spike into the intercontinental railroad? All they “found” was a little girl who didn’t know how to die, over on a shore they never should have broken ground on.

Then in a few months it’s going to be one of those graduations where, instead of all the seats filled, some are going to be left ceremonially empty, right? Whoever’s principal now will give token diplomas to the dead kids’ parents, along with a single red rose, and, if there’s any justice, any decency, the media won’t be there to document this. No reason for it to live forever. Just let it be the beautiful terrible thing it is, and then keep moving, keep moving.

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.

But there aren’t any real fighters anymore. Just killers and the killed.

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.

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

Is just violence, which shares an important v with revenge.