Lost Signals Quotes

“Dark myths and suburban legends roam like living things through the halls of Leeds High School, whispered in stairwells over bubblegum-tinted tongues ; scrawled on the wall of the secret room above the auditorium stage ; argued over in the shaded courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria, buoyed on grey-brown clouds of cigarette smoke. There’s the Weird House up on Tremens Terrace, haunted by a trio of cannibalistic fiends with a taste for wayward boys. And the coven of teachers, including Mr. Gauthier (Chemistry) and Miss Knell (English), who cavort with a charred-skin devil in the glass-walled natatorium after dark.”
― Josh Malerman, Lost Signals

“She could see how the entirety of human inquiry was irrelevant. Human creativity nothing more than a petulant whine after listening to the songs of burnt out stars, the poetry of entropy. Voices of dead throats in ancient caverns.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“We are each of us antennae, tuned to the deep. And deep calls to deep, over and under us, around us . . . through us. Jack Spicer proclaimed the poem no more for the poet than the song is for the radio. Sun Ra told us there are other worlds that wish to speak to us. Signals are everywhere, piercing our bodies—unheard broadcasts, coded transmissions, via a million unseen wavelengths—T waves, radio, the breath of distant stars. The breath of things behind the stars.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“The air smelled of popcorn, charred meat, wet animal fur.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“What do kids know of loneliness ? Enough. They may not understand it, but they recognize it when they see it. Maybe the poster itself is a giveaway—or maybe just the fact that a forty-year-old man would dress up in a costume and talk to children over the Internet for money. No wonder that kid was crying. Nobody wants to meet a sad Santa.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“Dave once asked me if I ever sleep. He’s seen the blue glow of the television flickering in my window in the small hours of night. I tell him, yeah, the TV’s on, but only for background noise. It’s nice to have voices in the room other than my own. I can’t sleep through the night, and often wake to the pitch-black of solitude. The mind can go to bad places in the time it takes to reach the remote. “That would drive me crazy,” Dave told me, “all that racket.” What troubles me is the silence. Funny thing about the Lurking Man : He’s loudest in the dark. Throw on the light and he’s reduced to a whisper. Even the dimmest light is better than none. That, neighbor, is why I sleep with the TV on at night.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“A liquid clicking crackled from the speakers and then a horrible keening filled the air. It was a song sung by fleshless mouths, mandibles and teeth clicking together beneath a strange, warbling chant. The same as that sung by Inuit women while they circled a fire in which a man was cooked alive.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“Soon, it’s past midnight, and we’re entering the small hours. The ones, the twos, the threes—we’re a long way from ten. The Lurking Man can show up any time of day, of course. But the small hours—this is where he lives. We’re in his home now, passing through in darkness like the moon crossing the ecliptic plane.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“That shape cannot exist properly because there is no heave and so it reverts to a single wavelength. So that these things can exist we preserve the wavelength but divorce it from these givens.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals