The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.

that was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories – most included in this volume – which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller...

The waitress came by with a pot of black coffee. She was a smallish woman, about forty, still had some of her looks left, but she had a hardness to her face. Money and bad...

Life is swimming to shore with cowboy boots on.

Then he’s in trouble.”Conversation between two Gestapo OfficersThe Informer by Steen Langstrup

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn’t guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from...

How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies?

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of...

The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it...

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will...

I have saved no one but myself and now I watch for the other universe to unravel in my skull, for the sky to become my own skin and fill with stars.

I wasn’t that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I...

Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.

about Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.

There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn’t one of those. Lammers was one of...