Will > Books: fiction‎ (429)

”The dominant stallion chases even off his male offspring when they’re two or three years old. It avoids inbreeding. Nature’s smart."
…”What about t

”The dominant stallion chases even off his male offspring when they’re two or three years old. It avoids inbreeding. Nature’s smart."
…”What about the female offspring?” Will said.
“He doesn’t breed with them. They’ll breed to one of the subservient stallions.”
“Would horses like this know not to do it?”
“No,” Daddy began, but Mateo approached us leading Noble, who was tossing his head and rattling the stud chain, and we went temporarily single-file to allow them to pass. “These animals haven’t been in a feral environment for generations. They don’t have the same relationships they form in a band. Given a chance, any one of them would mount his own daughter.”

In this moment I controlled what happened next. If he could use my body, I could too.

Good mothers were rarities, the center of everything.

Good mothers were rarities, the center of everything.

When Polly was a child, and thought like a child, the world was a fluid place. People came and went and never looked the same from month to month, or year to year. They shifted bodies and voices—a family friend shaved a beard, a great-aunt shriveled into illness, a doctor grew taller—and it would take time to find them, to recognize them. Polly studied faces, she wondered, she undid the disguise. But sometimes people she loved disappeared entirely, curling off like smoke. Her father, Merle, told her that her mind was like a forest, and the trees inside were her people, each leaf or needle a memory. Her mother, Jane, said that memories were the way a person tried to turn a life into a story, and Papa, Polly’s great-grandfather, said that there was a story about everything. He would tell them something long and strange to explain the existence of tigers or caves or trees, but then he’d say, Well, the Greeks said the same thing, or the Finns; the Athabascans, the Etruscans, the Utes, Days were an Aztec snake swallowing its tail, water came from a Celtic goddess’s eyes, thunder was a deadly fart from a Bantu in the sky.

Polly’s great-grandmother Dee told her once that there were three kinds of dreams—not the passing filaments, the sorted trash from the day, but the ones that came back, over and over—about three kinds of things: wishes or desires, loss or being lost, and fear. All her life, Polly thought these categories felt true, and lately, they came to her in combination.

Childhood is a green knot, hiding places and suspended time. It is the speed she can run through grass, the heat of the air, the fear of pissing her pants on the school bus, the difficulty of returning someone’s gaze, a bright object in the sand, the way a good moment can slide to bad.

“You sure you should be working around kids?” Jade asks. “Or even around, you know, living people?”
“Tried the morgue in Boise,” he says. “There wa

“You sure you should be working around kids?” Jade asks. “Or even around, you know, living people?”
“Tried the morgue in Boise,” he says. “There was . . . an incident. Ask your dad about it sometime, he was there."

Jade waits for him to guffaw or chuckle, because this has to be a joke, doesn’t it?

“Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?”

Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. - definition from Wiki

Stacey Stacey Stacey Graves
Born to put you in your grave
You see her in the dark of night
And once you do you're lost from sight
Look for water, look for blood
Look for footprints in the mud
You never see her walk on grass
Don't slow down, she'll get your--

The original meaning of "final girl", as described by Clover in 1992, is quite narrow. Clover studied slasher films from the 1970s and 1980s (which is considered the golden age of the genre) and defined the final girl as a female who is the sole survivor of the group of people (usually youths) who are chased by a villain, and who gets a final confrontation with the villain (whether she kills him herself or she is saved at the last minute by someone else, such as a police officer), and who has such a "privilege" because of her implied moral superiority (for example, she is the only one who refuses sex, drugs, or other such behaviors, unlike her friends). - from Wiki

I wanted to push back against the notion of the final girl being a supermodel, valedictorian, or babysitter. Since the 1970s, they’ve all been Jennifer Love Hewitt types. For many girls and women, that’s an impossible ideal. The book’s main character, Jade, has dealt with feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Also, most of the victims are rich and entitled white guys, not 17-year-old cheerleaders. - from the 5280 interview

When people in Proofrock can direct their binoculars across the water to see how the rich and famous live, that’s only going to make them suddenly aware of how they’re not living, with their swayed-in fences, their roofs that should have been re-shingled two winters ago, their packed-dirt driveways, their last decade’s hemlines and shoulder pads, because fashion takes a while to make the climb to eight thousand feet.

...if you don't have those staged resets, those laughs, then horror just becomes the flat screech, and that's no fun. - from the GQ interview

She’s everything Jade always wished she could have been, had she not grown up where she did, how she did, with who she did.
It’s going to be epic, the final battle, the final girl against slasher high noon.
Unless Jade’s just making it all up, she reminds herself.

Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his s

Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his sweat-soaked shirt and against Junie’s cheek, his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. She recognized that moment as the beginning and the end of something—though she was too young to say exactly what that something was. But she knew, without really knowing she did, that the gossamer threads we put out into the world turned into filaments, and filaments into tendrils, and that what people called destiny was really the outward contours of billions of these tendrils, as they exerted their tug on each of us.

Her most vivid childhood memories were about music, and although they commanded attention, in the end they led nowhere. She remembered crouching on the floor under the piano as her grandfather played it above her. She was five, it was the year before her parents died…In her mind, she wasn’t just under the piano; it was more like she was wearing it as a cloak. Its vibrations enveloped her, echoed in her chest, and emanated down to her toes, claiming her, and she hugged her knees tight just to keep herself in place.

Junie scooted over toward him on her knees, reached into the well-worn tub where his feet were planted, and poked at the gnarled sinews and bones in them.
“Your legs grew roots, Grandpa,” Junie said, “like those trees by the river!”
He looked at her, then down at his own feet.
“Do you think my legs will grow roots like yours, when I’m older?”

…because of what happened to her the previous year in Beijing, Cassia understood that what set human events in motion were the most ethereal of tendrils, a kind of machinery no less powerful for its lack of discernible shape.
--------------------------------------
He had assumed that even when the weight was at its heaviest, there had been a rope that tethered them to each other, such that pulling was possible.
--------------------------------------
How did an umbilical cord turn into a noose?

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she mumbled between spasms of breath. “I want to stay here with you and Grandma, even when you are old, forever and ever—”
Grandpa started to shake his head when he heard the word “forever,” but he saw Junie’s fever-red cheeks and stopped himself.
“If you send me away, I’ll turn,” she told him.
Grandpa stared at her.
“I’ll turn into a fish and swim back here,” she said, pointing to the direction of the river, “from America!”
“From the river?”
“I’ll learn to swim for a long way,” Junie said. She’d seen America on a map, and it was across an expanse of textured blue. But what was an ocean, after all, but a bigger body of water? And didn’t adults say that all rivers drained into the sea?

To Cassia the fog had an inviting, tactile quality. Being in its midst must be like being embraced by the most benign form of water, because you could be immersed in it without drowning.

Though I didn’t always grow up near bodies of water, in my writing I find myself drawn to rivers and coasts, probably because they gesture toward circulation and connectivity, and yet also have unique moods when observed on the time scale of days, years, decades, and even centuries.

What I hope to show with characters like Momo is that the experience of emigration, however hopeful, involves a kind of sundering, a giving up of people and things that otherwise sustain them. And because much of what they give up—the fabric of an extended family, rootedness to a place, an honest narrative of one’s own past—are wholly invisible, they often find it hard to articulate the shapes of these more wayward forms of grief. - from the Pen America interview

…this morning, while driving the last stretch of road with a storm gathering, I thought: Is it possible that grief too is like music? Maybe once grief begins, you cannot simply cut it off. Rather you have to let it run its course the way an aria comes to its last note. You cannot stop grief in its tracks any more than you can cut off the aria at just any point you deem convenient.
And maybe, like someone said, love is a wound that closes and opens, all our lives.

“When we arrested her, she was covered in blood—it was all over her body, in her hair—so when you come to the station, you should bring a change of

“When we arrested her, she was covered in blood—it was all over her body, in her hair—so when you come to the station, you should bring a change of clothes.…there are no visible wounds on Penny. But the victim was found deceased at the scene, and we believe it’s the victim’s blood on your daughter’s body.”
Grace got the impression the detective was holding something back.
“She’s calling herself Eve, but that’s not the name on her license.”
Again, a chill ran through Grace. Eve.
“She said she doesn’t remember anything that happened before we showed up. We think maybe she’s in shock, but we’re not sure,” Allio went on. “Is Eve a nickname?”
Grace paused, deciding how to answer. “It’s more complicated than that,” she offered.

Your shrink at Edgewater was a guy named Dr. Dennis Palumbo, who we all despised. Well, maybe all but Ryan, because Palumbo thought the same thing he did: that you didn’t have DID. According to Palumbo, DID wasn’t even a real condition, and didn’t belong in the DSM…It’s thought that DID is just a variant of a borderline personality disorder, or in your case an antisocial personality disorder, and that the appearance of your alters is akin to fantasy play rather than a verifiable neurological state. In short, Palumbo thought you were an expert liar.

This was the hardest book I’ve ever attempted. There were so many moving parts and for my first ever mystery (mostly I do crawl out from a hole thrillers, not murder mysteries with clues peppered throughout). - from the Judith D. Collins interview

When I switched from writing as Daniel Palmer to writing as DJ Palmer, my themes changed along with my name. The DJ books delve more into family drama and psychological suspense. - from The Nerd Daily interview

On that bleak afternoon, Lucky Dog looked anything but. The dark interior had the ambience of a power outage… Four of the nine stools at the dark varnished wood bar were occupied by beefy men, who put the dive in dive bar… Behind the bar stood stacks of bottles that looked sticky even from a distance. The air reeked of booze and cleaners, overlaid by a whiff of desperation.

“Dr. Cross, who gave us the DID diagnosis, said that we all start out with multiple personalities when we’re young. Is that something you believe?”
“I do,” said McHugh, nodding. “It’s like learning about life through committee. Those disparate voices in our young minds help us figure out the world and how different environments and stimuli affect us. Do we like things sweet or sour; what’s funny to us; what scares us? By age nine, our experiences tend to mold us into the person we become, and all those likes and dislikes, our moods and disposition, solidify into a single identity—this concept of self.”

A town like this feels so safe and apart from the outside world. You start to wonder if it’s dangerous.”
“The fairy tale of it, you mean?”
“Right.

A town like this feels so safe and apart from the outside world. You start to wonder if it’s dangerous.”
“The fairy tale of it, you mean?”
“Right. False security. You stop looking over your shoulder, because the picture feels real. Nothing bad can happen when there’s a moat around the whole town, right? Battlements. Guards at the gate. But the dragon shows up anyway.”

“These are my obsessions,” Paula McLain said. “How do we survive the unsurvivable? How do we climb off the table as a victim? How did we get there in the first place?” - from the NY Times Personal article

Above the roofline of the Masonic Hall and against a gauzy sky, the figures of Time and the Maiden stand sharp and white, the most iconic thing in the village. A bearded, elderly figure with wings and a scythe, braiding the hair of a girl standing before him. Her head bowed over a book resting on a broken column, an acacia branch in one of her hands, an urn in the other, and an hourglass near her feet—each object an enigmatic symbol in a larger puzzle. The whole carving like a mystery in plain sight.

Almost immediately I knew the story had to be set in Mendocino—a small coastal town in Northern California where I spent time in my twenties—and that the time frame of the narrative had to be pre-DNA, pre-cellphone, before the Internet had exploded and CSI had lay people thinking they could solve a murder with their laptop. - from the Author’s Note

…when she started digging into the research, she realized that there had been real-life abductions in California at that time — including the kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma bedroom. McLain weaves Klaas’s tragic story into the novel, reminding the reader of yet another young woman who never had a chance to shine. - from the NY Times Personal interview

Some nights nothing happened. Other nights I would wake to a shape in the doorway, the husband’s inky silhouette. And then I would disappear inside myself, barely breathing, frozen. I vanished so expertly that I wasn’t actually in my body any longer as he peeled me away from my sister. I didn’t make a sound.

Above the cloud line, an eerie yellow sphere is rising. It’s the moon, gigantic and overstuffed, the color of lemonade. I can’t stop watching it roll higher and higher, saturated with brightness, like a wound. Or like a door lit entirely by pain.

Firs and pines and Sitka spruce thicken around me, pushing in from all directions, black-tipped fairy-tale trees that knit shadows out of nothing, night out of day—as if they’ve stolen all the light and hidden it somewhere. God, but I’ve missed them.

“Krummholz” is the word for this kind of vegetation I remember from one of Hap’s [her beloved foster father] lessons, a German term that means “bent wood.” Over many decades, hard weather has sculpted the trees into grotesque shapes. The salt-rich north wind kills the tips of the branches, forcing them to dip and twist, swooping toward the ground instead of the sky. They’re a living diagram of adaptation, of nature’s intelligence and resilience. They shouldn’t be able to keep growing this way, and yet they do.

You know, we don’t always understand what we’re living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it’s going to turn out.

Paula McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress–before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. She is the author of The Paris Wife…an international bestseller…She is also the author of two collections of poetry; a memoir, Like Family, Growing up in Other People’s Houses; and a first novel, A Ticket to Ride. She lives with her family in Cleveland.

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Ha

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another. - the opening of The Iliad by Homer

I’m not sure I could have made it more obvious, but he hasn’t understood at all. I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves.).
I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused and how its consequences played out. Epic in scale and subject matter.

The drama of war is not always found on the battlefield. It’s in the build-up, the aftermath, the margins. Where the women are waiting. - Haynes – from The Observer article

Mankind was just so impossibly heavy. There were so many of them and they showed no sign of halting their endless reproduction. Stop, she wanted to cry out, please stop. You cannot all fit on the space between the oceans…you must stop, so that I can rest beneath your ever-increasing weight.

You were wedded to fame more than you were ever wedded to me. And certainly, your relationship with your own glory has been unceasing.

What kind of man wore a bronze breastplate and a plumed helmet to return home? One who believed that his power was seated in his costume, she supposed. The red leather of his scabbard was very fine, studded with gold flecks. She did not recognize it, and realized this must be part of his share of the fabled wealth of Troy. To have killed her child for a decorated bit of animal skin. She could feel the contempt shaping her mouth into a sneer, and stopped herself. Now was not the time to lose control. That would happen later.

A war does not ignore the lives of half the people it touches. So why do we?

…a few minutes later in the car, he found the first of the messages. It had been forwarded from the contact form on his own author website (Thanks

…a few minutes later in the car, he found the first of the messages. It had been forwarded from the contact form on his own author website (Thanks for visiting my page! Have a question or a comment about my work? Please use the form!) just around the time as he was about to go on the air with local Seattle institution Randy Johnson, and it had already been sitting there in his own email in-box for about ninety radioactive minutes. Reading it now made every good thing of that morning, not to speak of the last year of Jake’s life, instantly fall from him and land in a horrible, reverberating crack. Its horrifying email address was TalentedTom@gmail.com, and though the message was brevity itself at a mere four words, it still managed to get its point across. You are a thief, it said.

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve.

...at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears. No doubt I now grew very pale; --but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased --and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound –much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath --and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly --more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart

but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore!- EAP

I seem to be attracted to sociopathic male antagonists. I also appear to like college campuses. - from the Scoundrel Time interview

It grew louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! - EAP

The Plot may seem a little hard on writers, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone; we’re hard on ourselves. In fact, you couldn’t hope to meet a more self-flagellating bunch of creatives anywhere. At the end of the day, though, we are the lucky ones. First, because we get to work with language, and language is thrilling. Second, because we love stories and we get to frolic in them. Begged, borrowed, adapted, embroidered … perhaps even stolen: it’s all a part of a grand conversation. - from Acknowledgements

I felt that I must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! - EAP

…how many stories like theirs, Arden thought.
People who escaped to the sky with high hopes, lived a short life there and disappeared.

…how many stories like theirs, Arden thought.
People who escaped to the sky with high hopes, lived a short life there and disappeared.

“What’s happening?”
“You’re graduating,” she said, “from solid to vapor.”

Purposeful planning only happens smoothly when we shrink our numbers back to tribal size. A tribe with elders and a chief and a visionary or two can agree on change and affect a tribe’s fate. The leaders of most modern nations cannot. And the best corporations are run as dictatorships, where one person can overrule everyone else. Large numbers of people, each with a bit of power, can’t agree on anything.

Most of the good things in life come from small. And most of the bad things come from big. Humans like growth, but we often lose sight of the fact that big means power…most of our atrocities come from the abuse of power; and from the big and powerful, we have gotten our worst atrocities.

“The past isn’t love,” Estra said. “Love is the future.”

“We’re less a ‘read between the lines’ family and more a ‘hallucinate something onto this blank sheet of paper’ family.”

“We’re less a ‘read between the lines’ family and more a ‘hallucinate something onto this blank sheet of paper’ family.”

…how often he felt an onlooker in the company of other men, outside their easy bawdiness and filthy banter. Robert’s otherness had made school, that welter of vicious adolescent boys, a misery before athletics had rescued him, and it bred in his adulthood a certain isolation—men didn’t invite him along when they went to seedy places, or tell him about their adventures there.

“Why do we never, ever tell the truth to each other? Why do we keep so many secrets?”

That’s such a challenge; it is so difficult to know, as the writer, how a story unfolds to the eyes of a fresh reader. Suspense is not just whodunit, of course! It can be super subtle. It’s the element that keeps the reader interested and engaged, wanting to know what happens next. I remember something I heard from an NPR interview with a TV writer: the writer said, when discussing how to write a successful pilot: “Don’t explain ANYTHING at first” and after hearing that, I reviewed some stories that I considered to be very engaging (written and film/TV), and realized that they did that: in the beginning they explained almost nothing, opened up a lot of questions and answered very few. It was really useful advice. My own corollary would be: “When you answer the questions you have raised: answer some soon, some slowly, and some in surprising ways—and always raise new questions as you go.” The “questions” can be tiny or big, some can be answered in the same paragraph in which they are raised, or on the same page, or not be answered until the very end of the story; they all work to keep the reader caring about what’s coming and wanting to read on. - from the 26.org interview

They sat for a while longer, two sisters up far past their bedtime, the old house creaking and sighing around them, always in the process of settling, never completely at rest.

Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it

Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it wouldn’t be easy. These kids were going to grow up in an idyllic world and be thrown into an apocalyptic nightmare.
They were the generation that would experience the Sixth Extinction Event.

Knock-knock-knock.
No, that’s not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.

I slide one leg off over the edge of my bed, which makes it wobble. The robot arms rush toward me. I flinch, but they stop short and hover nearby. I think they’re ready to grab me if I fall.
“Full-body motion detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?”
“Pfft, seriously?” I ask.
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?”
I open my mouth to answer.
“Uh…”
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
Only now does it occur to me: I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I do. I don’t remember anything at all.
“Um,” I say.
“Incorrect.”
A wave of fatigue grips me. It’s kind of pleasant, actually. The computer must have sedated me through the IV line.
“…waaaait…” I mumble.
The robot arms lay me gently back down to the bed.

It’s caused a lot of headaches with the translators. Nobody outside the U.S. knows this phrase. Even English-speaking countries like the U.K. don't have that expression. In most of the language translations, they're changing the title. In one of them it’s just called The Astronaut or something like that. - from the GR interview

Ryland Grace was my first attempt to make a protagonist not to be based on me. He's a unique character I'm creating from whole cloth, and so I'm not limited by my own personality or experiences. - from the GR interview

I’m a smartass myself, so smartass comments come naturally to me. For me, humor is like the secret weapon of exposition. If you make exposition funny, the reader will forgive any amount of it. And in science fiction—especially with my self-imposed restriction that I want to be as scientifically accurate as possible—you end up spending a lot of time doing exposition. - from the Publishers Weekly interview

After The Martian, I had this idea for this massive space epic—a traditional sci-fi pilot with aliens, faster-than-light travel, and telepathy and a war and, yeah, a ten-book series and everything. I worked on it for about a year; it was going to be called Zhek. I got 70,000 words in, and…I realized that it sucked…But there are a few nuggets in Zhek that were solid. There was one interesting character who was this absolutely no-nonsense woman with a ruthless drive to get what she needs to get done and a tremendous amount of secret authority. And she became Stratt in Project Hail Mary. The other thing is, in Zhek there was this substance called black matter, which was a technology invented by aliens that would absorb all electromagnetic waves, all light, and turn it into mass and then turn it back into light…if humanity got ahold of some of that, it would be neat, but it would suck if we accidentally let any of that get into the sun—that would be a disaster. I'm like, “Wait a minute, that would be a disaster! That's where books come from!” - from the Goodreads interview

Science teachers know a lot of random facts.

…the way Una thought about it, without folklore and traditions, surely Ireland didn’t really exist? Surely it might just as well be England or Fran

…the way Una thought about it, without folklore and traditions, surely Ireland didn’t really exist? Surely it might just as well be England or France or anywhere else (give or take an endless soak of rain)? So just as there were those who preserved the country’s mother tongue and those who saved up all the country’s native stories, there were those like her father who devoted their lives to maintaining the country’s old beliefs.

…these days you heard less and less about those ancient superstitions, and all the old tales cast aside for future progress.

She explained how a farmer’s wife had lost her entire family a way back in some ancient war, so in her devastation she had placed a curse which dictated certain rules around killing cattle.
Henceforth, no man could slaughter alone
Instead, seven others had to be by his side…
And ever since then, Una warned, these rules had to be adhered to or else the widow’s grief would be forgotten and the whole of Ireland would become diseased.

Gilligan admits to having made it all up. “The butchers themselves, as an idea, they are a conglomerate of loads of different kind of traditions and superstitions and myths about cattle that I just found in my research, and I just brought them all together and formed the butchers.” Part of the fun of it, I suppose is that like, it kind of could be real. It’s as real as any other set of the many, many traditions and superstitions that we still hold on to.”

There were days Ireland felt modern, and days it felt anything but.

I know this is denial.
I know.
But I can’t face it.
I thought I wanted the truth, once. Now, I realize, I was safer in my lie.

I know this is denial.
I know.
But I can’t face it.
I thought I wanted the truth, once. Now, I realize, I was safer in my lie.

Possessive, Graham says. I can hear the smile on his lips.
He’s not here, I say in my mind. He’s dead…I can feel a storm on the air, the bright, sharp glimmer in everything. And as I pull the car door open, I think I feel him on the icy breeze.
Goodbye, Hannah, he says. Good night, sweetheart.

I can see him, in my mind. His hands gripping the lectern, glancing down at his notes. Dressed the part—clean-cut, pushing his hair back from his face each time he made a point he wasn’t quite sure of.
The only person who saw that tic for what it was, of course, was me. To everyone else, he was all confidence. All knowledge. All smiles.
“‘She had left the last blood of her husband/Staining a pillow. Their whole story/Hung—a miasma—round that stain.’ We can hear the detachment in Hughes’ narrative voice throughout the poem, in which he and his wife take ‘possession’ of a house which is contaminated by the ghosts of its previous inhabitants.” He draws breath. A draft flutters the curtains. “There’s an inevitability to it, as though, by finding the omens, their ‘sour odor,’ he might have sensed even then that only one of them would make it out alive, though they would be haunted by their memories; their guilt, their complicity, their shame.”

“A good story,” Graham says, all echoes and reverberations, the ancient tape wavering. “A good story has a life of its own. It’s a thing that lives and breathes. A thing that comes to life in a kind of agreement between the teller and the listener—a shared fantasy, that makes even the wildest illusions real. They make us complicit, when we believe in them. They make us say, ‘Yes, I agree—I accept it. It exists for me.’”

People say motherhood brings it out in you: a need to protect your child that verges on madness.
Only now do I realize it’s true.

“I received a free ARC of Possession by Katie Lowe from Macmillan in an exchange for an honest review.”

What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money fl

What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill. It made me think of something I’d heard about the Orient, that water drained the opposite way there. Who wanted to live in a place where water spun backward or money flowed uphill. These towns that had no business being towns, straddling islands and bays and cliffs and canyons and waterfalls.

It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself.

They woke on a ball field—bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and baskets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds tongues over the Spokane River. Seasonal work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys and the pavilions of traveling preachers, and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans.

As I was doing research into Pinkertons, I came across James McPartland, who was probably the most famous Pinkerton detective of all time. Reading how many of these were from England and Scotland sent me on this sort of trail of creating a character who would speak in these sort of late 19th century, early 20th century British detectivisms. So I was reading about detective fiction and things and coming across the most wonderful phrases and Del announces himself, arriving in Spokane by train, saying “Spokane gave me the morbs,“ morbs being a morbid feeling, a sense of unease… Some of the things that Del said were some of my favorite things to write in the book. - from the Northwest Passages interview

”…while I appreciate what you did back there, as long as you’re traveling with us I ask that you abide the I.W.W.’s code of nonviolence.”
“Nonviolence?” Reston stopped and gave a winking half smile. “When a mob intends to throw you in a river?”
“Especially then,” Gig said.
Reston laughed—a rusty sound like an old gate swinging open. “Good God,” he said, and tossed the club he’d been carrying. “I’ve fallen in with idealists.”

I did know from the beginning that I was writing about something that bedevils our culture right now, which is the massive gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. Billionaires in America made two trillion dollars during the pandemic. You’re living in a broken economic system when that happens. In 1909 the economic system was horribly broken… When I realized my characters were named Ryan and Gregory, I gave them the nicknames Gig and Rye, which to me was a wry nod at the gig economy that we live in now. The idea that driving for Lyft or delivering and being your own boss, having no health care, in many ways we have created an economy that mirrors 1909. We’re not climbing on trains and jumping off them to find work. But we still aren’t providing basic needs for a lot of people who are slipping further and further. - from the Northern Passages interview

He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one room flop, poor Danny [his late brother] sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and [a fellow worker] dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

A bum wanders and drinks
A tramp wanders and dreams
A hobo wanders and works

You expect a glove in a melting snow mound. Three days later we realized it was a hand. - The Barrow Wight

The human fang is unique in that we use it t

You expect a glove in a melting snow mound. Three days later we realized it was a hand. - The Barrow Wight

The human fang is unique in that we use it to bite not only one another but ourselves. - Joy, and Other Poisons

There’s plenty of ways to manipulate the man you love, and most of them you learn by watching. - Carbon Footprint

1) a frightening or unpleasant dream
2) A terrifying or very unpleasant experience or prospect
3) A person, thing, or situation that is very difficult to deal with.
It is derived from - Middle English (denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers): from night+ Old English mære ‘incubus’.

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

…I have not had too much success with men. This is not a statement of self-pity. This is just a statement of the facts. Here’s a fact: I have great breasts, which have warped my spine. More facts: my salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk…Eric is different.

To sex up the brand, they invited a popular chef, known for his radical liquid nitrogen ice cream, to write a cookbook. Except then his wife went missing and someone found her frozen foot.

...the bike lanes in Manhattan already terrifying at 11:00 am, filled with delivery boys and girls who jet into traffic with fried rice and no reason to live.

That was important to me. Don't get me wrong; I have a real soft spot for books that are just about relationships. I love that. But there's always a different kind of engagement and love I feel for writing that involves the dimension of work. That's actually what we spend most of our lives doing. I wanted to talk about how work and art have a symbiotic, but also adversarial relationship. You need money to live and eat, and then to make art, but the job you have can become the thing making it so that you cannot do any living, because you've spent that bandwidth trying to live. I’ve felt that so deeply in my own life, and in the lives of so many women I know. - from Esquire interview

I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at Union Square, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down.

She wasn’t simply unphotogenic. She was bare in a way that film betrayed so dramatically that she became grotesque.

I ask my customers to confirm my name, at times to be sure I have the right address, but mostly just to hear the sound.

…the truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die.

“Aegean’s full of the restless dead,” she said and made the sign of the cross. Her husband laughed. “You sound like an old woman.” He held her head be

“Aegean’s full of the restless dead,” she said and made the sign of the cross. Her husband laughed. “You sound like an old woman.” He held her head between his hands. “The dead are dead.”
She twisted from his hold. “It isn’t safe.” - from The Sea Cemetery

Chase shot his wife, Rebecca, a sarcastic grimace. “I don’t see how anyone could miss that monstrosity.” He motioned to the large, yellow and white confection with its ornate tower. It dripped gingerbread and confused the eye with its many gables and dormers. - from Sandcastles

I felt an unexplained, strange vibe about this place, but couldn’t understand why. - from The Stumpville Affair