Devil House

by John Darnielle

There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective. “Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes.

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.

Randall Jarrell poem,

Connected to A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

brothers and sisters are always locked in battle to the death when it comes to the old masters, who invariably rise to their theme once the killing starts.

carapace

This word is shiwing up a LOT in my 2023 reading

There are only three weeks left in the school year; there’s no single word in the English language precise enough to describe the atmosphere on campus when it gets this close to summer break.

IT WILL ALWAYS SEEM CRASS TO ME to enter your bedroom.

I thought that we were getting a personal second person, but now I want to know who the speaker is!

It makes him look like one of those people who hang around outside the public library but never check out any books.

What a DESCRIPTION

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

People are awful, even when they’re not trying to be. None of the stories they tell themselves are good.

Murder seldom inspires much lasting interest beyond the houses it strikes. You used to have to really work at it to make a name for yourself.

His mother would be angry, but anger was different. Anger passes. Disappointment vibrates.

You can really spend a lot of time with things you’re not ever going to nail down.

He always found himself going back to the map as he read through them, trying to situate himself within the fictional space again and again, until it seemed as real as the outside world.

What an interesting way to paint college planning

THE OTHER THING THAT HAPPENED when Jesse was nine, besides all the other things that kept happening and why dwell on them, they are what they are, you said, you can’t fix the past, was that he met Gene Cupp.

In the castle, he said, which is a structure not imported into England until after the Norman conquest, which is, at the earliest, five hundred years after the death of the best candidate we have for the historical Arthur. So, no castle, no king? I said. No, no, that’s not the point of the lost age, he said. The point is that the king is still in his castle, but to you, he doesn’t look like what you mean by king, and his castle doesn’t look like a castle.