Devil House

by John Darnielle

Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.

any given moment is loaded. You have to look hard at all the details of a scene before it changes on you. There may come a day when all you’ve got left are the notes you took: maybe a photograph or two, if you’re lucky.

“Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes.

This one feels more alien to the eye than the older pictures in my file. I call this the proximity effect: the closer you get to the past, the less believable its particulars seem.

But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.

There was a movie about it a few years later, River’s Edge: it was popular, because people love to tell themselves stories about the grave dangers posed by wayward youth. They always arrive at the same questions—why don’t these young people care? how did they get like this? where were their parents?—but the asking of these questions is an exercise in self-portraiture. They’re not good questions; they’re not even questions. They’re ghost stories masquerading as concern.

Reporters are like the police. It’s in their interest to tell you whatever you need to hear as long as it makes you cooperate.

There is ample space in the brain for several worlds to occupy at once.

I’m a professional. I don’t care if I feel like an idiot. It’s kind of an item of faith with me that my feelings aren’t important when I’m working.

Languishing in obscure details until they reveal their deeper secrets may not be wealth, but you’re fooling yourself if you think it isn’t luxury.

One thing seldom asked of those on whom disaster has laid its hand is what their future plans were before the flood.

the sticking point, the thing I’d want to talk about except that I don’t know how, is what to do about the people you can’t get close to because they’re completely gone.

Remembering that children are older than you think they are is one of the most reliable errands of parenthood, and one of the hardest.

Secrets require care and nurturing; they die when they hit the air.

like many who’ve brushed the edge of the spotlight, she’d learned the value of the carefully chosen word.

he smiles again, a smile he’s very fortunate to have been born with, I think.

What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?

it matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit.