Kindle Notes & Highlights
For several months now he had seen human faces only on television, in reruns of old sitcoms and crime shows. He was even starting to doubt whether people still had faces; maybe this last year everyone’s faces had vanished, leaving nothing behind but long rows of teeth that everyone covered up now for aesthetic reasons.
Pandemic in a nutshell. Totally relatable. Still throws me off when I see pandemic references in books.
By the end of the wake, the entire body is boiling in there, and thanks to the meat acid, by dawn it turns into a jelly-like mass. The jelly is then stored in barrels until the time comes to refresh the fields. Then the jelly, which we call stamen, is plowed into the fields in early spring. From summer to fall we harvest. That’s when the earth gives back what it takes from us during the year. The meat acid is also provided by the earth. Without that we couldn’t recycle the bodies into the soil so efficiently. Uncle Rudolf got recycled as well.
I hope, most of all, that I’ll meet Karcsi and know for certain that he succeeded, and we’ll play together, as if we had never grown up, forever in the midnight school.
Beautiful writing.
She ran out of fuel two hours later. She let the Toyota roll until it came to a complete stop, then she laid her head on the wheel so that she could finally get some sleep. In the distance, beyond the snowfall, colossal three-legged giants walked in silence. Maybe they were only trees, but who cared when this car would make such a great bed?
The traffic lights on the main street have been out of order since forever, the wind tossing them on their wires like men hanging from a gallows.
‘Your faith is worth nothing,’ he said to the wounded man. ‘It was invented by a pulp writer to earn the money his fiction never brought him. He didn’t have the eyes to see the Nameless Lords himself, but he gave you eyes to see your own suffering. We often drank rum together when I was younger. I was the one who suggested he establish a church. How many miserable bastards he has sent here to die – you can’t even count! And you know the best part?’
Lovecraft mixed with L. Ron Hubbard. This is hilarious.
Eventually, the High Servant stepped out of the cave. My skull nearly exploded with a sudden stab of pain. No matter how hard I tried I was incapable of focusing my vision on the Servant’s material body; it always seemed slightly out of focus. This might be a means of self-preservation; the brain refuses to admit what the eyes see, in order to preserve the semblance of the normality of the world.
In truth, they were all children. They were teens caught in their thirties, still reeling from the shock of understanding that this was it. This was life, adulthood already, but like teenagers they were still holding out hope that there was more.
One of them was her; it might be a red one, but she hoped it wasn’t, she didn’t want her new life to be centered on luck. She hoped it was the black one. Yes, the black maybe. Because the black is dangerous, and there’s no limit to what it can do.
That is a hell of an ending.
