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

by Stephen Graham Jones

for Wes Craven: we miss you

You don’t understand, he wants to explain to her. I have to see who this is. She won’t come knocking again. All of which translates down to I’ll never be this eighteen again, he knows.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pater noster, qui es in caelis in a rhythm Jade can almost clock, and he keeps on saying it, but the words are hardly making it past his lips now. All Jade can tell of them, it’s that it’s an apology. The kind you make when you’re… afraid? Of dying?

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