Devil House

by John Darnielle

But it would have been cheating, I thought. The proper procedure involves several needless steps.

keepsakes are just memory-prompts, and you don’t really need them if you have a good memory. Mine is excellent.

“Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes. I’m sure of this now. Live and learn.

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.

Getting lucky is at least fifty percent of good research;

I was happy to see this dog. A dog brings something cheery to even the grisliest of scenes, or so it’s always seemed to me, and the presence of a second tongue mirroring the painted one on the sign overhead seemed almost like an artist’s choice, an Easter egg for the keen onlooker.

It’s California. Nothing lasts.

But people entering adulthood seem to hold tight to childish dreams nowadays, even carrying them into the lives they make for themselves.

It was good to feel young, it was good to feel like you were getting a clear view of the bigger picture.

LIFE IS A PROCESS of forgetting: of moving old things out of the way to make room for new things, of holding faded blueprints up to light to see where vanished angles might be hiding, of recalculating wants and needs on the fly. It’s not that we become forgetful as we age, though that’s true, too. It’s that a million things will need to be forgotten along the way if our later forgetfulness is to have any meaning.

Seeing old friends address nagging questions about which we sometimes otherwise feel uneasy: Am I the same person I was when I was young? Are my earlier selves still safe somewhere inside me?

Everything is not more chaotic. Our younger selves are still around, waiting for somebody to invite them out to play.

One should revisit such places only after having done some hard calculations: What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things? What are the chances we’ll regret the bargain later on?