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

by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

But, that’s just it, isn’t it? 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.

So far that’s pretty much all high school’s been: a series of “next times.” A higher and higher stack of maybes. But that tower’s got to crash down into a perfect moment eventually, doesn’t it? Maybe that day’s today.

A daughter knows her mother’s gaunt, angular features anywhere, even in a snowstorm.

If anything empowered Jennifer Daniels to dispatch him, I submit that it was neither magic nor fate nor shared genetics, it was simply that, in the absence of a father, she had come to claim former sheriff Angus Hardy as that for her, and so would do whatever necessary to protect him, up to and including taking on a mountain of a man, and winning.