Poor Yorick of infinite jest.
It waits till we’re weak before it reveals its strength.
I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.
By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.
Liar’s smile
He’d believed that he was smarter and more disciplined than the others, and that these traits alone might save them. He was a fool, though; he could see that now. He’d been a fool to cut off Pablo’s l...
He was shier than she would’ve guessed; even that evening, standing so near, the rain spattering against the taut fabric only inches above their heads, he hadn’t dared to kiss her good night. This was...
Trying to remember things. It was what people did, Amy had decided, as they waited for death; they lay there struggling to remember the details of their lives, all the events that had seemed so imposs...
Stacy waited till she was certain he’d fallen asleep, then slipped free of his grasp, edging backward, leaving his hand lying open on the tent’s floor, palm up, slightly cupped, like a beggar’s. She i...
Maybe there isn’t a way, he said. Maybe all we can do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we’re able. The food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever it’s going to do...
All the lies people utter around death in order to comfort themselves, to bury their grief with the body, but here, suddenly, they were true. Die, Eric said in his head. Do it now, just die. And all t...
That was what they were so clearly doing here: they were waiting. And not in any suspense, either, not in any anxiety as to the outcome of their vigil. They were waiting with no apparent emotion at al...
Stacy wasn't certain; she'd never bothered to pay attention to details like that, and was always regretting it, the half knowing, which felt worse than not knowing at all, the constant sense that she...
Recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the better work of Jim Thompson (The Grifters; After Dark, My Sweet) and Thomas Berger’s tales of small-town souls who succumb to murderous mayhem.