I was a spectator who had gotten free admission to a freak show.

Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind bending that it must be presented as fiction to be accepted.George SaundersThe Bookseller

He wasn’t gullible enough to be bullied by the ghost’s accusation – for Andrew Fletcher had his share of guilt, but he’d never thrown anyone down a well, either.

She gave herself a hard twist and fell into a sitting position, staring at me with those maggot-filled doll’s eyes.

A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just...

Fear is a prison in which we place ourselves. You need only to press against the bars to realize that the door is always unlocked, and you are always free to leave.

I turned to her, my whole body hard with tiredness and regret.

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath…He’s always,always in my...

You shouldn’t have done that, Dave.

I’m not a bad person.

I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.

She sensed her own power to enslave him. He would come willingly enough. No filthy atheistic beliefs she held were strong enough to douse what was crackling in the brief space between them. It would...

I thought if I loved you enough I could change you. I was so stupid.

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped...

People spend their entire lives fearing the very thing you apparently crave. They do anything they can to delay the process or fool themselves into believing it’s farther away than it actually is. With every...

Remember. Observe, assess and act. No hesitation. No remorse.

Every time I had things straight in my head abouthim, I saw him smile or crook an eyebrow, and all my sensible reasons on why I couldn’t have feelings for him seemed redundant.

‘There’s no time for right or wrong,’ I said.

During our time together in this place Holly didn’t outright avoid me or treat me rudely. But she wasn’t—how do women like to put it? She wasn’t emotionally available to me.

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.