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

by Stephen Graham Jones

For Wes Craven: we miss you

Dark Mill South came back, though. The good ones always do.

History never looks like history when you’re living through it,

He’s been around long enough to know that every father’s most basic wish is to sacrifice himself to save his kid, that there’s no better way to cash out, and that him wishing that is just… he’s one dad in a sea of dads, all of them perfectly willing to walk open-eyed into a buzzsaw if it means their kid doesn’t have to.

Eleanor.”

Truth or Dare

There’s a reason we’re supposed to be afraid of this night,’”

a grinning impulse to rush into them with her arms and her eyes and her heart wide open.

Melanie

To her, for now, it was the god of these low waters, feeding on the particles of rot that made their way down from the sunlight.

He was older now, his face all messed up, but he was still the same boy she remembered, and she could tell in his eyes that he knew her, that he would say her name if she drew too close, and that he might laugh in his way after he said it, and she didn’t know what she would do then.

Tab

Silas couldn’t explain it, the elk with the branching antlers couldn’t explain it, the fish that was a god knew but wouldn’t say, and there were no actual words in the song coming from the church, just a murmur, a feeling, a prayer.

If you can leave, you leave.

that wicked little scythe curving up from his right hand like the worst, best erection.

last breath shaping what sounds like Pater noster, qui es in caelis in a rhythm Jade can almost clock,

The Lord's Prayer

Jade bites her lips, has to blink fast, and sneaks a look up into the sky. Because she might see Mr. Holmes up there, buzzing around in his sky go-cart.

Yes, there is a certain elegance to both Jennifer Daniels and Dark Mill South being Native American, but, if anything, this should be celebrated, not reduced to an explanation—celebrated because the Native American population has evidently recovered enough that, in a remote hideaway like Proofrock, Idaho, there can be two Native Americans, not just one.

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.

to come with her if they wanted to live,

Nice. So Cinn IS a film fan

And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.