Quotes from Chet Williamson

Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal.

Merridale was as self-centered as a Broadway star on opening night.

The customers were mainly people middle-aged or older, and they'd probably take a sledge hammer to anything that spewed out the top forty. This was Lawrence Welk country. A wild tune was a polka.

Batman was the only D.C. title in the bunch, and just barely. He had liked the movies more than the books, but there was something about the character that he just couldn't dismiss. Maybe it was the fact that Batman was just a man with a neat suit. No super powers, no glowing rocks, no fast-motion – just a man with a mission. Man with a mission.

The old Arab epigram drifted into his mind, that God invented silk so that women could be naked in clothes

Gossip? Me? How would I know about such things?" "Don't think of it as gossip. Think of it as rumor and innuendo.

All he knew was that the rage was still there, eating inside him, not with the slow stealth of a cancer, but with the rapid, careless ravening of a weasel gnawing at his entrails, or the constant alimentary torment that drives on the shark to his incessant feeding until only death gives him rest.

The pickup bumped heavily over the worn and stony footpath. The up-down motion made Cliff belch. He hit the break and came to a full stop in order to take a pull from the bottle. This was one time he couldn't drink while driving.

When you met people, they were on their best behavior, smiles and best manners. You couldn't tell what lurked beneath the surface

Don said, "By any chance did someone come in to confess while I was out, and just maybe you forgot to mention it?" Corrine said no one had.

You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That's Latin. You know what it means?" The roommate gave a negative grunt. "It means something like, 'Remember you gotta die.' And that's what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we're all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we're here.

He'd read that rage remained forever in a place that had once nurtured it. "The spirit of the place.

Hope springs eternal in the town of dreams...and so does despair and humiliation.

I draw a very clear line between being religious, like lots of nice, kind, friendly people are, and being an overbearing, narrow-minded, pompous, parochial, ignorant ass, which is what you are.

DEDICATION "To The Creator, who gives us the Light by which we more clearly see the Darkness…

Both power and chemical executives (who were also catching flak from environmentalists) sent their own representatives to Merridale in an effort to discover the true cause and clear themselves, or, if the fault were theirs, find some way to reverse the phenomenon and/or cover up their involvement in it.

If they didn't have box hockey and baseball cards in heaven, Andy was going to be pretty bored.

Max took a bag of smoke and flash grenades, the .45 and shotgun Lee had left behind, an Uzi, two short tripod- and swivel-mounted guns with radio antennae, a bag of extra clips, and the bag of surveillance equipment. As an after-thought, he took out the tire iron and jammed it into the ammo bag.

To achieve the kind of hard beat 'Gasm needed to back up Hartz's guitar madman act, Reichmann could have done as well pounding on a trash-can lid.