Horror Novels

"Who rules you, nomads? Do you answer to someone's will besides your own? Are you free to choose your own path, or will the Volturi decide how you will live? "I came to witness. I stay to fight. The Volturi care nothing for the death of a child. They seek the death of our free will."

"Goodbye, Jacob, my brother...my son."

""If we live through this," Garrett whispered to Kate, "I'll follow you anywhere, woman." "Now he tells me," she muttered."

"It probably wasn't very mature. But I figured it would take Aro about half a second to guess — if he hadn't already — that my shield was more powerful than Edward had known. [...] So I grinned a huge, smug smile right at Jane."

"I lifted my head and kissed [Edward] with a passion that might possibly set the forest on fire. I wouldn't have noticed."

"So there are real werewolves?" I asked. "With the full moon and silver bullets and all that?" Jacob snorted. "Real. Does that make me imaginary?"

"And then [Edward and I] continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever."

"Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. [...] She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewan High had individual - and thus private - showers like the ones at Andover or Boxford. They stared. They always stared."

"On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue."

"It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th."

"No one pronounced Jerusalem's Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of the previous days, it retained every semblance of life."

"The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys."

"Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting — not for the first time — on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood."

"And you couldn't explain that to your mother and father, who were creatures of the light. No more than you could explain to them how, at the age of three, the spare blanket at the foot of the crib turned into a collection of snakes that lay staring at you with flat and lidless eyes. No child ever conquers those fears, he thought. If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth. Sooner or later you found someone to walk past all the deserted meeting houses you had to pass between grinning babyhood and grunting senility. Until tonight. Until tonight when you found out that none of the old fears had been staked— only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top."

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

"Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you."

"And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or a pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites."

"I think that house might be Hubert Marsten's monument to evil, a kind of psychic sounding board. A supernatural beacon, if you like. Sitting there all these years, maybe holding the essence of Hubie's evil in its old, moldering bones."

"I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling."

"...the Lot's knowledge of the country's torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there."

""Red", Momma murmured. "I might have known it would be red"."

"She had bought a special brassiere to go with it, which gave her breasts the proper uplift (not that they actually needed it) but left their top halves uncovered."

"Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is. That...smell!"

"Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you."

"Jesus watches from the wall, but his face is cold as stone. And if he loves me - as she tells me - why do I feel so all alone?"

"The word that [Sue] was avoiding was expressed To Conform in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board in front of the soap operas, while hubby was off busting heavies in an anonymous Office..."

"Yet although she had swum and she had laughed when they ducked her (until she couldn't get her head up any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream) and had tried to take part in the camp's activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol' prayin' Carrie and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. 'For straight is the gate', Momma said grimly in the taxi and at home she had sent Carrie to the closet for six hours."

"Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don't believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was."

"Did any of you stop to think that Carrie White has feelings? Do any of you ever stop to think? Sue? Fern? Helen? Jessica? Any of you? You think she's ugly. Well, you're all ugly."

"She hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of blackheads. She hated her face most of all. The reflection was suddenly split by a jagged, silvery crack. The mirror fell on the floor and shattered at her feet, leaving only the plastic ring to stare at her like a blinded eye."

"The concept, linked irrevocably in her mind with the "sin" of intercourse, had been blocked entirely from her mind. She may simply have refused to believe that such a thing could happen to her."

"She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard."

"The girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins."

"Let them burn, then. Let the streets be filled with the smell of their sacrifice. Let this place be called racca, ichabod, wormwood."

"What fascinated us about Carrie was that her religious mother could believe that Christ performed miracles, yet when her daughter demonstrates miraculous abilities, she deems that satanic."

"Very rarely in my career have I explored more distasteful territory."

"I couldn’t see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn’t like and wouldn’t be able to sell. So I threw it away … After all, who wanted to read a book about a poor girl with menstrual problems."

"...am returning my contract to you at this time. I feel that I would kill myself before ever teaching again. Late at night I keep thinking: if I had only reached to that girl, if only, if only..."

"A week after the tornado of '54 had cut its path of death and destruction through Worcester, the air was filled with the sound of hammers, the smell of new timber, and a feeling of optimism and human resilience. There is none of that in Chamberlain this fall. the main road has been cleared of rubble and that is about the extent of it. The faces that you meet are full of dull hopelessness."

"People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it."

"God had turned His face away and why not? This horror was as much His doing as hers."

"Carrie's mother: "I can see your dirty pillows. Everyone will. They'll be looking at your body. The Books says-" Carrie: "Those are my breasts, Momma. Every woman has them"."

"But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love."

"Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor."

"What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control if the game. It’s the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow us a first definite step down some road."

""It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act."

"To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole."

"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party...As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do."

"Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour."

"You will always have some excuse not to live your life."