It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering...

I am a woman of very few layers, and most of them are selfish and mean. My parents tried to make me a good girl, but I just wasn’t having it.

I felt a lunatic’s laugh welling up inside me.

It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches...

They say things about these woods…that there are strange things living here.

Dude, don’t die out here.

Because I love a pair of pretty green eyes.” He grinned.

She smiled at him like a freshman invited to the senior prom. It made my blood boil.

It’s not about winning, it’s about doing what’s right. And yes, we will do what’s right.

I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised,...

Since I was a very young thing, others have told me that what I think, and the things I like, and the ideas I have, are bad. This has always been very puzzling to me....

I like to think she hates my guts a little less every hour.

I found serenity in the towers, especially the highest, even in the midst of winter. The crows also enjoyed the lofts, and I habitually fed them.Often I held conference with the grotesques lining the summit....

He walked to the bathroom and looked into the mirror, trying to see himself through her eyes. It was time to change his style, throw off the shroud of timidity and start living his life.

I don’t know how these things died without benefit of a bullet to the brain pan. They seemed to exist in an eternal twilight of longing.

A scent. Your mother’s shampoo.

She played me with a bad hand, and I fell for it every time.

‘Can’t you see what they are?’ I said. ‘They’re all dead.’

Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds...

The catacombs where ghostly bodies lie. In the silence you hear the screams go by.

I wanted to see the bullet coming, wanted to know the exact moment of my death.

She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave,...

She holds you like a whore in the night, but she’ll take your soul and not think twice.

I heard them tearing at it. It was the sound of mortality.

Tangled onto the shuttle, we were being woven back and forth to create the same tapestry of despair and heartbreak and loss. It was so muchbigger than I could see before, and all I had...

The people inside the gym didn’t stand a dead drunk’s chance.

A riverless silence made the air heavy.

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known...

I am who I am and always shall be.

People talk about survival. What they mean is killing the other guy.

Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace...

So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.

I knew then I was going to die in the street without ever seeing Holly again. All because I tried to help an old woman, proving for all eternity that no good deed goes unpunished.

Is there a house up there? You’re not a sylph or something that really does live wild, are you?

The sound of him drinking was indescribable—like dirty runoff down a storm drain.

Sal turned, an eye stalk hanging from his teeth.

he night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at...

Evil takes only prisoners….Time takes none.”From The Tenth, chapter 28.

Drive. He’s already dead.

The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d...

You can’t get the blood out.

His eyes were like two wafers of slate, grey and lifeless.

Never tease anything that wants to eat you.” Reign of Blood

N-no doubt.” I smirked again.

Smiling, he handed Landry the bloody aluminum bat Warnick had used. ‘Time to die, old man,’ he said.

I don’t know why I told you all those things, but I did. Maybe it was because I’m a drunk, and sometimes drunks like to confess.

The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at...

Lucy in the sky. Without her I am the walrus, likely to lose myself in dark gibberish and fade away.” Lance Underphal, Cut-Throat Syndrome.

Did you ever think it won’t be the undead who kill us, but ordinary people?

Irwin was difficult to wake; the poor man was totally wiped out. He collapsed in one of the soft office chairs the moment Smith let him, sliding back into slumber. After he was settled, I...