The Candles Are Burning (Into Shadow, #6)

by Veronica G. Henry

Maggie gazed at her husband’s face and, even after all these years, felt that flush of warmth.

WONDERFUL description of the feeling of suddenly being seized by dissociation!

Are the candles in this restaurant vessels for departed spirits? Calling it now

Savannah was a city built on top of its dead.

The place was a soulless ruin.

This whole sequence (getting the shack, sprucing it up, etc) is reminding me of 'On Sundays...' MUST reread

For reasons she didn’t understand, in the weeks following her husband’s death, Maggie felt something bordering on a compulsion to take up candle making.

KNEW IT

In the distance, she could just make out workers digging a grave, the red-tilled earth opening the door to another loss.

Maggie saw something that turned her insides to pulp.

Pinpricks of yellow light blinked into view. They had the appearance of frenzied candle flames, flickering in and out like fireflies. Like tiny ghosts out for an evening stroll, they curved and twisted and gyrated down the road and amassed around a freshly dug grave. There the flames grew, sprouting torsos and arms and legs, ghoulish skeletal heads.

What i am SAYIN

Her eyes were like a cabinet door that refused to stay closed.

There is no greater terror than hearing the scream of someone you love.

OH ok, i now see that i misread that passage the first time. I assumed it was an emotional defense/dissociation response rather than an actual, physical event. Interesting!

It's the guilt, babey!!

She came through on the other side in a cavernous underground chamber that went on as far as she could see. From the hard-packed earth beneath her feet to every outcropping scaling walls with no ceiling—candles. Poised in ornate candlesticks, candelabras, gilded jars. Every one different. A dizzying, infinite collective. All burning, all in various stages of melt. Maggie couldn’t make sense of it.