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

by Stephen Graham Jones

In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by.

Dark Mill South claimed that he wasn’t done yet. Thirty-five dead wasn’t thirty-eight, and that’s the number he was going for. The media followed this number back to his home state of Minnesota, where thirty-eight Dakota men had been hanged in 1862—the largest mass execution in American history.

Or so someone might say who believed in slashers and final girls, fate and justice.

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.

Instead, her only friend is an old man dying in a concrete box at the top of the world, and her only memories are stained with blood.

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?

What kind of bullshit death dream is this supposed to be?

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.

But, as 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.

She’s just… she’s hiding in the video store, like Letha was saying. She’s seeing connections that wouldn’t even be there if she didn’t know all the shit still swirling around inside her.

The cynosure for Proofrock in December was Dark Mill South, who prefers to orient his victims such that they face that same magnetic north, when and if there’s time to set such a tableau—as

Monsters happen, Mr. Armitage.

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 no one could expect her to hurt all the time and not take anything for it.

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

This is the birth—the rebirth—of America’s serial killer of the moment: Dark Mill South.

“Jennifer goddamn Daniels,” Hardy finally says.

Perhaps this is the true cost of being what she would call a final girl?

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