Will > Books: fiction‎ (429)

…she told about the coming resurrection, when our dead would rise from their graves and walk the Westside streets.
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…she told about the coming resurrection, when our dead would rise from their graves and walk the Westside streets.
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A Westsider should know better. The dead do not return; grief does not subside. Our memories fade, until those we loved are no more real than paper saints on a wall.

Originally, Westside was imagined as a straight mystery, but as I found myself writing the early chapters, it occurred to me that the street scenes I was writing felt eerily empty. I wondered why that might be, and gradually (over the course of two or three very painful drafts) evolved the concept of a city where the Westside is desolate and isolated and the Eastside is vastly overcrowded. - from the Bidwell Hollow interview

I was born and raised in Nashville, Tenn. As early as six, I remember wanting to live in New York City—this probably had something to do with obsessive rewatching of Home Alone 2 and the fact that Eloise was one of my favorite childhood reads. Even after I learned that living in New York usually doesn’t mean life at the Plaza Hotel, I was infatuated with the city, where I moved for college in 2006… One of the many reasons why I’m thrilled to continue working on the Gilda Carr series is to give me a chance to hang out with my own imagined version of New York—where, coincidentally, the rent is very low. - from the Bidwell Hollow interview

I paid my nickel and cupped my hands under the hose, slurping up whatever didn’t run through my fingers. I wiped my hands on the patron to my left, who was glassy with drink, his mouth stained bloody by the beet red liquor.

All I want is to help people—give them food, shelter, a midwife, a chance. But all that costs a hell of a lot of money, and crime is the only thing that pays.

…we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when not the if. And the

…we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful and uncertain it will be.

This is how I lived back then—through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armor against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.

Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They’re like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.

It felt as if the words and thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.

My life was a tiny narrow corridor with no doors leading off it, a tunnel so narrow it bruised my elbows, with only one way to go. That or the void I told myself. That or leave.

It rained for days on end. The drops drummed onto the rooftops and hammered the streets. Thunder growled like the anger of our forefathers. It felt like the city was under attack, like the city and its streets might begin to give way, dissolve, its life flowing into the Wisla and out into the cold depths of the sea.

We swam, fearless and free and invisible in the brilliant dark.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you t

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

“Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”

You would be the same way if you’d been reared in a household where the cat slept in the roasting pan.

Micah always thought that of course his sisters would choose to be waitresses. Restaurants had the same atmosphere of catastrophe that prevailed in their own homes, with pots clanking and glassware clashing and people shouting “Coming through!” and “Watch you head!” and “Help! I’m in the weeds!” A battlefield atmosphere, basically.

He hadn’t always thought marriage was messy. But each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience.

Sometimes I don’t manage to keep them endearing, and if that happens, I ditch them. It takes me two or three years to write a novel. I certainly don’t want to spend all that time living with someone unlikable.

In an interview in 1976, discussing Faulkner, Tyler said, “If it were possible to write like him I wouldn’t. I disagree with him. I want everyone to understand what I’m getting at.” As Katharine Whittemore wrote of Tyler in a superb essay in the Atlantic in 2001, “She never dazzles or blinds us with her prose. . . . Instead the quiet accretion of her insights hits one in the chest.”

Comanche Chief Tosawi reputedly told [Union General Philip] Sheridan in 1869, "Tosawi, good Indian," to which Sheridan supposedly replied, "The only g

Comanche Chief Tosawi reputedly told [Union General Philip] Sheridan in 1869, "Tosawi, good Indian," to which Sheridan supposedly replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." - Wikipedia

You hide in the herd. You wait. And you never forget.

The headline kicks up in Lewis’s head on automatic, straight out of the reservation: not the FULLBLOOD TO DILUTE BLOODLINE he’d always expected if he married white, that he’d been prepping to deal with, because who knows, but FULLBLOOD BETRAYS EVERY DEAD INDIAN BEFORE HIM. It’s the guilt of having some pristine Native swimmers…cocked and loaded but never pushing them downstream, meaning the few of his ancestors who made it through raids and plagues, massacres and genocide, diabetes and all the wobbly-tired cars the rest of America was done with, they may as well have just stood up into that big Gatling gun of history, yeah?

Really, Lewis imagines, he deserves some big Indian award for having made it to thirty-six without pulling into the drive-through for a burger and fries, easing away from diabetes and high blood pressure and leukemia. And he gets the rest of the trophies for having avoided all the car crashes and jail time and alcoholism on his cultural dance card. Or maybe the reward for lucking through all that—meth too, he guesses—is having been married ten years now to Peta, who doesn’t have to put up with motorcycle parts in the sink…

Death is too easy. Better to make every moment of the rest of a person’s life agony.

Particularly in the world today, we need to learn the lesson that, while there is certainly evil in the world, it is possible to overcome it. I have always had a fondness for horror. When I was seven years old, my mother took me to see The Crawling Eye, a cheesy sci-fi/horror flick that I loved. The Tingler came out when I was still seven, and I saw and loved that one too, maybe with my older brother. A few years later Mr Sardonicus. I can recall no trauma, although clearly I had mom’s DNA and enjoyment of horror films to support my interest. Jones makes a strong point about why it is important to stay the course while exposing your kids to these things. Well worth the reading.

Q: When you thought about writing a golem character, did you think about other legends and myths about people being created out of inanimate matter? Adam from earth? The famous Golem of Prague, the greek myth of Prometheus, or Pygmalion? Frankenstein’s monster? Or even the idea of creating a modern robot? Did you want to write from those traditions or come up with something completely different?

A: I certainly wrote the Golem’s character with those legends and stories in mind. In fact, in early drafts she was much closer to something like the Golem of Prague. She had less emotion, and less insight into the emotions of others. But it became clear that that wouldn’t do for a main character. So I made her more empathic, more “human” in that sense, and I think that brought her closer to the androids and cyborgs of modern science fiction, like the replicants of Blade Runner and Star Trek’s Lt. Commander Data. But I think all these stories have the same sources at heart, and the same central question, of what happens when we create life that approaches human but isn’t quite. - from LitLovers interview re Book One

I don’t think I set out to deliberately showcase strong women, but I did consciously work to give every female character her due. I was very aware that I couldn’t be lazy about the women in my book, that the Victorian setting and the “fairytale” aspects might pull me toward more stereotypically weak or flat female characters if I wasn’t careful. At the same time, I couldn’t be anachronistic; I had to be true to the constraints that women lived with in that era. In the end, I became very interested in how they lived with those constraints, how they either chafed against them or found a (perhaps uneasy) peace and a certain amount of self-expression despite them. - from the Fantasy Literature interview in 2013

You don’t pay all that money for them to be nice to you. They’re gonna tell you what they think. I was having this conversation with a friend of mine, Amanda, who was in my workshop with me. She gave me probably the best tough love conversation I’ve had in my life. She said, “Helene, can I ask you a question? Why are you writing like this?” I said “What do you mean, writing like what?” She said, “Ok, you’re doing these very Raymond Carver, very realist short stories. Very MFA model. But that’s not who you are. I’ve been to your apartment. I’ve seen your bookshelves. I know what a nerd you are. And you are always talking in class about injecting the genre into literature, and busting down the barriers and bringing magic into stories and that’s what you groove on. So why are you not doing that?” I honestly had never thought of that. She had taken my head and whipped it around to where I needed to be looking at. You know I’m still like “But that’s not…these stories…don’t…with the,…that, no.“ She said “ok, look. The next thing I see from you in the workshop, I want it to be about your family, but I want it to be magical.” I was like, “Ok…well that’s my marching orders. I’m going to do what she said. I went home and sat and thought about it. It was, literally, two hours later I had the rough outline for what would be The Golem and the Jinni.” - from the Lady Grey interview

I was lucky, and The Golem and the Jinni was successful enough that, before long, I could start thinking seriously about selling my next book. Readers seemed interested in a sequel; my publisher, too, liked the concept. I had a few vague ideas for other, non-Golem-and-Jinni books, but none of them were clamoring to be told. I was now mother to a two-year-old, with a baby on the way. I was turning forty, and I was tired. The first book had taken me seven years to write. I really, really didn’t want to do that again. Write a sequel, said my weary brain. It’s got to be easier than starting over from the beginning. - from the Fantasy Café interview

I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet some

I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies, but they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.

The Red House Mystery – A.A. (Alan Alexander) Milne – 1922
Malice AforeThought – Anthony Berkeley Cox – 1931
The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie – 1934
Double Indemnity – James M. Cain – 1943
Strangers on a Train – Patricia Highsmith - 1950
The Drowner – John D.MacDonald – 1963
Deathtrap – Ira Levin - 1978
The Secret History – Donna Tartt – 1992

It’s hugely important. I think Boston is a good location for a thriller, but I write mainly about Boston because that’s where I live. In Her Every Fear, [published in 2017] I wanted to write something that felt like a gothic thriller, and to me, a large apartment building in Beacon Hill just felt right. That section of Boston feels a little bit trapped in time. It has cobblestones, and narrow streets, and several of the buildings still have stable doors.

It was impossible for me not to think of Clarice Starling,…from Silence of the Lambs. It was where my mind almost always went, to books and movies. It had been that way since I first began to read, And Mulvey, like her fictional counterpart, seemed too tame for the job. It was hard to imagine her whipping a gun from a holster, or aggressively questioning a suspect. She did question a suspect, though. She questioned you.

I heard the ticking sound that meant Nero was coming toward us along the hardwood floor. Agent Mulvey, who heard it as well, turned and looked at the store cat.

“I felt closer to Claire than I’ve ever felt to anyone before or since,” I said.” But sometimes I didn’t know her.”
Tess was nodding. “I feel the same way about Brian, close, I mean, then every once in a while, he’ll say something, or else I’ll read something he wrote, and I wonder if I know anything about him at all.

On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been

On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chipewa.
My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept. - from the Author’s Note

She had seen how quickly girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost…That wasn’t going to be her life.

Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled, others were tiny grooved scallops…
“Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas.
“From the endless way-back times.”
“Think of it. [the] baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?”
“We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells, Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can’t know these things.”
…”Sometimes when I‘m out and around,” said Wood Mountain, “I feel like they’re with me, these way-back people. I never talk about it, but they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.”

Her hair, shoulders, and back grew damp. But moving kept her warm. She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.

She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.

Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beaut

Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures. It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better. Mind—and heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.

Neither the law nor any code of morality constrains him, because he knows them to be fantasies of order. In truth, the only rule by which anyone can live successfully, either in the wilds or in civilization, is the sole mandate of cruel Nature: Prey shall submit, and predators shall reign supreme.

To Woody, the internet was a planet of its own, every site a village or a city with its neighborhoods and streets, a planet across which he traveled as if by magic, typing a brief incantation and, with a click, teleporting from one continent to another.

On Interstate 80, south of Colfax, they pulled into a rest stop that provided bathrooms as filthy as any in the state’s most deteriorated public schools.

As a citizen of the modern state, he had uncountable reasons to understand that a slight excess of power rapidly became a lethal excess, that when an agent of the state insisted he had come to help, there was at least a 70 percent chance that he had come to punish or pillage.

the wind howled down on the house, not a nature sound empty of meaning, but a shriek of blackest madness
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The wind sang requiem for the world, and it seemed to Carson that the chilly currents of harried air were more than that, were also time itself racing toward some plug that had been pulled, to drain away and leave the world eternally still, silent, and dark.
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the sagging chain-link sang eerily in the wind: Hell’s harp strings strummed by a demon hand. Plastic bags of numerous origins, in a variety of conditions, caught in the gaps between the links, flapped and fluttered, producing a sound like a swarm of wings, as if a colony of bats were passing low overhead.
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The wind raving like rabid wolves outside, the building seeming filled with machine sounds, as if the Robots of the Apocalypse were being manufactured there.

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us. - Maurice Maeterlinck

I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in

I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in them that is wonderful. I’m just different and I love these bears enough to do it right. I’m edgy enough and I’m tough enough. But mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right. – from the video diary of Timothy Treadwell, self-proclaimed “Grizzly Man,” recorded right before he was eaten by a bear

On April 1, 1969 the Board of Commissioners of Skamania County, Washington State, adopted an ordinance for the protection of sasquatch/bigfoot creatures (Ordinance No.69-01). Although it sounds like an April Fool's Day joke, it was an official ordinance. It was published in the local weekly newspaper, Skamania County Pioneer on April 4 and April 11, 1969. Because people did not take it seriously, the newspaper publisher had the article notarized on April 12, 1969, and printed both the ordinance and an Affidavit of Publication in a subsequent paper edition. - Courthouse Libraries- BC

It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.

Adversity introduces us to ourselves.

A cloth covers the jar that Bridie took from the bookcase in the nursery, and Ruby is thankful for this. For the contents have the ability to rearr

A cloth covers the jar that Bridie took from the bookcase in the nursery, and Ruby is thankful for this. For the contents have the ability to rearrange even a dead man’s sense of reality. As with all terrible, wondrous sights, there is a jolt of shock, then a hypnotic fascination, then the uneasy queasiness, then the whole thing starts again; the desire to look and the desire never to have looked in the first place.

Mrs Devine
Domestic Investigations
Minor surgery (Esp. Boils, Warts, Extractions)
Discretion Assured

London is awash with the freshly murdered. Bodies appear hourly, blooming in doorways with their throats cut, prone in alleyways with the head knocked in. Half-burnt in hearths and garroted in garrets, folded into trunks or bobbing about in the Thames, great bloated shoals of them.

The man, looking up, hesitates and the child bites him, a nip of surprising sharpness. He pulls his hand away in surprise and sees a line of puncture holes, small but deep…The man stands, dazed, flexing his hand. Red lines track from palm to wrist to elbow, the teeth marks turn mulberry, then black…What kind of child bites like this, like a rat? He imagines her venom—he feels it—coursing through him …A blistering poison spreads, a sudden fire burning itself out as it travels…All- the time the creature watches him, her eyes darkening—a trick of lamplight, surely!...He would scream if he could, but he can only reach out. He lies gasping like a landed fish.

Breathe in—but not too deeply. Follow the fulsome fumes from the tanners and the reek from the brewery, butterscotch rotten, drifting across Seven Dials. Keep on past the mothballs and the cheap tailor’s and turn left at the singed silk of the maddened hatter. Just beyond, you’ll detect the unwashed crotch of the overworked prostitute and the Christian sweat of the charwoman. On every inhale a shifting scale of onions and scalded milk, chrysanthemums and spiced apple, broiled meat and wet straw, and the sudden stench of the Thames as the wind changes direction and blows up the knotted backstreets. Above all, you may notice the rich and sickening chorus of shit.

Look at this stuff
Isn't it neat?
Wouldn't you think my collection's complete?
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who has ev'rything?
Look at this trove
Treasures untold
How many wonders can one cavern hold?
Lookin' around here you'd think
(Sure) she's got everything

Her spectacularly ugly bonnet is curled up before the fire, bristling with feathers. She refused to give it up into the hands of the butler. Not that the butler was overeager to take it. If it comes alive, Sir Edmund thinks, he will do for it with the poker.

God grant eternal rest to Mammy, Daddy, James, John, Theresa, Margaret, Ellen, and little baby Owen. God grant that bastard Paddy Fadden a kick up his hole and severe death to him and his gang, of a slow and terrible variety.

It was my own personal theory that most lifetimes could be summed up by ten to twenty moments, meaningful snippets ranging from a handful of second

It was my own personal theory that most lifetimes could be summed up by ten to twenty moments, meaningful snippets ranging from a handful of seconds to a few spins around the clock face that contained both the best and worst of one’s character and experiences...In my case, it only took thirteen moments from my forty-three years to convey an insightful understanding of my life, twelve recollections that I told proudly and one that always stung a little bit in the telling.

Tom hoped this conversation was over and quietly stared out the car window at the faces of the strangers walking along Quince Street. One moment there was a stylishly attired couple and the next moment a homeless person in rags leaning against a wall. From his passing glance, he thought he saw a common loneliness in the faces of all three strangers and wondered if his weary mug made four. [the crossing out is mine]

…now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in a

…now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.

Look closely. It’s the spring of 2001 and I am finally sixteen. How many hundreds of ancestors knew a moment like this? Before the narrative of their lives changed once again forever, there was Bach and Ellington, Monk and Ma Rainey, Hooker and Holiday. Before the world as they knew it ended, they stepped out in heels with straightening-comb burns on their ears, gartered stockings, and lipstick for the first time.

When she looked into her future, she saw college and some fancy job somewhere where she dressed cute and drank good wine at a restaurant after work. There were always candles in her future—candlelit tables and bathtubs and bedrooms. She didn’t see Aubrey there.

Every day since she was a baby, I’ve told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries—everything—just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too.

…as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen. I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.

Salt for pride. Mustard seed for lies. Barley for curses. There are grapes too, laid red and bursting across the pinewood coffin—one grape split wi

Salt for pride. Mustard seed for lies. Barley for curses. There are grapes too, laid red and bursting across the pinewood coffin—one grape split with a ruby seed poking through the skin like a sliver through flesh. There’s crow’s meat stirred with plums and a homemade loaf, small and shaped like a bobbin…There are other foods too, but not many. My mother had few sins.

Sin eaters existed in parts of Britain until roughly a century ago. How many and who they were, apart from social pariahs, is almost entirely lost. What we know is that they ate a piece of bread beside people’s coffins to absolve their sins in a folk ritual with Christian resonances.

I spent a lot of time reading through Tudor cookbooks! In selecting pairings of sins and foods, I grouped some by types of sins (for example, sins related to envy all involve cream) and some by onomatopoeia (to me, the sound of “gristle” fits its sin, wrath). I also intended for some pairings to feel whimsical. I wanted to recreate the experience one has when hearing a nursery rhyme from hundreds of years ago: there are elements that make sense and others that simply don’t because their meaning has been lost over time. - from the Reading the Past interview

“When you get old, you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way…You go through life and you think you are something. No

“When you get old, you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way…You go through life and you think you are something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something, and then you see that you are no longer anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end you’ve become invisible, And it’s freeing.”

“I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—"Her voice became calm, adultlike. “Bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

Ever since I was a kid on that dirt road, I think that the biggest compelling engine in me has always been the desire to know what it feels like to be another person. I just always have been pulled through life by that deep curiosity to know. It’s a frustration for me to not even know what, like, these fingers touching the desk would feel like if it wasn’t me. As a result I have watched and watched and listened to people all the time. I’m always trying to absorb the tiniest detail that I can see or hear from them. - from the Guardian interview

You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was. As Cindy lay on her bed she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.

I remember walking down the street one day and all of a sudden realizing, Oh! Jim and Helen Burgess could actually be in Crosby, Maine. They could have dropped their grandson off at camp. That’s what New Yorkers do, they send their kids to camp in Maine. So I thought, how fabulous. It was so fun, particularly because it gave me the chance to explore the enormous cultural divide between New York City and Maine.

Ruth knew what evil could befall a girl traveling alone. Especially now, when there were demons dressed in army uniforms on every corner. Ruth knew

Ruth knew what evil could befall a girl traveling alone. Especially now, when there were demons dressed in army uniforms on every corner. Ruth knew of them as mazikin, terrible creatures whose work was the misery of humankind. They had accomplished their work in Berlin…newspapers printed captions beneath photographs of Jewish businessmen and lawyers and professors. Here are the animals. Do you know this Beast? That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option.

If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you have never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden.

Partly, I felt it was my last chance to meet survivors and try to understand how they could go through something like that and continue to be in the world. That’s what I really wanted to find out. After all that has happened, can this still be the world that they knew? (The title alludes to that.) And how can they still want to be in it? - from the Moment Magazine interview

"I was writing about what hate does, the effects of the fear of people who are ‘other.’ I didn’t realize that so much of what was happening in France during World War II was anti-refugee, that it began not as a movement that was anti-Jewish but simply anti-refugee. So I found myself writing about how it’s really a choice, about how easy it can be to look in the other direction. These things happen slowly and then, all of a sudden, they have happened.” - from the Bookpage interview

I always start a novel with a question. With THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW, my question was How do survivors of tragedy manage to go on? I found my answer when speaking with survivors in this country and in France. Even those who had suffered enormous loss valued life, wanted to live, and found joy in their families, their work, their memories and their daily lives.- from the Moment Magazine interview

It was different then. The air was different and the long remote crying of the steamboat whistles as they came down from the Monongahela and Pittsb

It was different then. The air was different and the long remote crying of the steamboat whistles as they came down from the Monongahela and Pittsburgh seemed to tell the story of a great nation and a great people with adventure and the look of distance in their eyes, and now it was somehow soiled with the stench of the dead. MacFarland was dead. Lincoln was dead. Neighbors had shot one another dead. It occurred to him that he rarely laughed anymore. Maybe laughter would come back, but it was a dark sun that had come over the country and a plague of crows.

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~ Robert Browning

It is so prevalent, the unlikable character, the cynical character, which keeps intelligence, I feel, at a very low level. It’s easy being cynical, constantly cynical. It’s sort of a fast and dirty way to appear intelligent without really being intelligent. It seems to be very prevalent to the point where any new, young writer starting out almost assumes that they have to take on that attitude. - from the Texas Monthly interview

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet

So it has been in human memory, wild places where the only law is the strength of your good right arm…that’s how it is in all of human memory, Vastness! And Age! And Memories of Eld!

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~ John A. Logan

Trees become fewer and fewer and far ahead Doris can see black shapes. Large animals, alert, moving away. She thinks this must be what enchantment is like, when a person is taken into the other world. Her spirits are effervescent now they are away from the Colonel, joy comes back to her and unwraps itself gift by gift.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert. ~ Pat Conroy

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

If music be the food of love, play on. ~ William Shakespeare

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an indi

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

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“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. -- Matthew, Chapter 18

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Most are found. Thousands are not.

Great events turn on small hinges.

The concept for the book dates back more than two decades, when King — who has depicted similar psychic characters as loners in books such as “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “Firestarter” and “The Dead Zone” — pictured an entire schoolhouse filled with such kids. When he began writing the book in March 2017, he thought of it not as a horror story but as a resistance tale, with 12-year-old telekinetic genius Luke, teenage mind reader Kalisha and 10-year-old power-channeler Avery forming a rebellion inside their detention center.
“I wanted to write about how weak people can be strong,” King says, speaking by phone from his home in Bangor, Me. “We’re each on our own island, and at the same time sometimes we can yell to each other and get together, and there is that sense of community and empathy. I love that.” - from the NY Times interview

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book?
Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

“I wanted to write a book like Tom Brown’s School Days,” King says, referencing the 1857 Thomas Hughes children’s classic about a British boarding school. “But in hell.”

Long before Stranger Things and even It, children with supernatural powers were at the center of King books like Carrie, The Shining, and Firestarter. “Like a pitcher that has a great fastball or slider, you go back to what worked for you before,” says King. “I do think that kids are sort of magic. When I was a young man, I could draw [inspiration] from my own kids. Now that I’m so much older, I am drawing from my grandchildren and what I see them doing and how I see them interacting.”