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

by Stephen Graham Jones

They’ll make it three minutes, five minutes, their book distracting them, this phone call taking all their attention, this bite of omelette so perfect. But then, when their mental discipline slips—you can see it happen: a shoulder will twitch, a hand will clench into a sudden fist. A chest will fill with air as if the lake is washing over them all over again.

her red-rimmed eyes the kind of blank that means she’s just been putting one foot in front of the other, that she’s already given up on actually getting anywhere. It’s the kind of walk that’s really just a long, slow fall.

It was best he didn’t try, too, wasn’t it? This momma’s boy knows better than to let himself get turned into chum. Or, really, if he’s being honest: you don’t disrespect Pac and then expect things to always go your way, Clate.

It sucks being the last one left is the thing.

Girls without mothers fall apart on the inside when someone like Christine Gillette remembers them, notices their new hair.

Never mind that Jensen’s sport is actually football, that basketball’s always been kind of stupid—you can’t even hit other players?

Letha shrugs about this new rule that nobody’s shooting anybody: it’ll hold until it doesn’t.

It’s not her responsibility to drop all this on this girl, she knows. But, too, if she finds out about it all at the third-reel bodydump, then it might slow her run down, let her catch a blade in the back. This is for her own good. Let her cry and shrivel now, so she won’t later.

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.

For Banner, for Adrienne, for everyone, she pretends it’s nothing, that she’s tough, that she’s grateful to be alive, that this is just the price for that. Key word: pretends. Not “shudders inside,” not “cringes every moment,” not “always a breath away from giving up.”

Evil isn’t armor, but money sort of is.

for the thousandth time she wonders how the old-time Blackfeet did it. Them and all the other Indians back then. Before Gore-Tex, before car heaters, before bags of beef jerky. On a day like this? 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.

“She’ll be okay,” Claude says. “You don’t—you’re the history teacher, not a doctor!” the deputy snaps back. “I know the genre,” Claude says back with an easy shrug,

But then she stops, can’t just leave it there. Can she? She should, she knows. You don’t investigate mysterious sounds, you don’t go skinnydipping, and you for sure don’t traipse into a place where it’s obvious people are already dying.

In slashers, you die because you don’t know stuff. Therefore, the more knowledge you can collect and piece together, the better your survival rate.