Quotes from Chet Williamson

We can't turn our backs on this." "I know we can't. It's following us.

Lucas remembered a sweltering August afternoon when he and Burt had bellowed laughter at a trade article detailing Kroeger's "meteoric rise" to prosperity. "I thought meteors fell down, not up.

SHE EATS THE POOR AND MAKES SHELLS OUT OF HER LOVERS

is the only constant in life, and murder is always preferred to impotence.

So many different forms of the beast in one place. As if you could just sprinkle some bog water on an ancient stone and some bizarre form of life might sprout there, uproot itself, and bound after a rabbit. Suddenly the luminous fog seemed alive with wet nostrils and eyes.

Reverend Forbes did not talk about Jonathan Carlson at all. He railed against sinners everywhere, the tone of his voice showing clearly that he felt that everything beyond his own church in Friendly became steadily more evil, and that Satan's blood dripped down the sides of the mountain, infecting all of those below with his darkness.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight." William James

He refused to think about how at the age of forty-eight he could conclude, without any satisfaction at all, that he'd been right his entire life for being a bitterly cynical bastard.

Leroy was sixteen and the oldest so he thought he was too good to drive. Let baby boys do that, he'd say.

Although charming when the situation demanded, Brad would never be accused of being happy-go-lucky. He was intelligent, and like most intelligent people, he could be moody, withdrawn, especially when bothered or . . . Thomasine hesitated to say scared.

He don't have no orgies," he said. "How do you know?" "Nobody's never had no orgies in Merridale. It's in the town code. If you have an orgy, you get hit by lightning." "Bullshit," said Fred Hibbs. "You ever read the town code?

The polychloride plastic bubbled hotly, releasing evil tendrils of carbonized waste floating into the air like fibrous black snowflakes from hell. Maybe the crackpot fundamentalists could use that. When you burned the cursed records, black demons fled into the air, momentarily visible, like a spirit relinquishing possession of a Haitian. Like a soul or animus departing a human corpus at death.

Hell, we're already more compatible than Cory and I ever were." "You mean she hasn't tried to stave in your head with an ashtray or cut off your balls with a butcher knife?

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule, Nietzsche had said.

The room was a mess, as always – magazines, newspapers scattered, unpacked boxes, a nest of cat hair on one side chair where their feline slept, furniture, mantle, a few knick-knacks all undusted.

Catalogs called it a "survival knife." Survival, in combat, meant knowing how to kill people quickly and silently.

He looked out at the dark of night seeking rumors of the moon.

A brittle crackling sounded ahead of them, then a peal of hearty laughter. "Badgers!" scoffed a booming voice with a heavy Spanish accent. "We don't need no stinking badgers!

He needed to find someone that needed killing.

But Mom was the craziest. The gun had really sent her into outer space. After finding it, she'd beaten him with a wooden spoon—so hard that he couldn't sit down the rest of the day, only lie on his stomach in bed.

His mother tried to get him back on the straight and narrow, but the sheriff locked him up one night after they found him naked in a cow pasture screaming about mind-taps and government conspiracies

Later, Jim thought of the bus the same way he thought of a Harlem whore. Everything is so easy until you step into that dark hallway, and bang.

His mother might not believe him, but here in the hospital, why, they would have to believe him. You couldn't have wolves running around loose in a hospital. No, they wouldn't allow that. Hospitals had rules, and one of them probably was NO WOLVES.

He inspected himself glumly in the rearview mirror, probing tentatively at the full-blown shiner that now graced his left eye socket. Deep reds and purples adorned it in bold, splashy strokes; and the moisture from his icepack gave it the appearance of a high-gloss finish. He briefly considered turning it in as his next art project, then stifled the thought.