“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”
“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.”
“Then, with a reeling horror, she knew. Staring up at her from the floor, discarded like a piece of trash, was an eyeball. She would have recognized that shade of hazel anywhere.”
“It was on that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or the sun; it cannot be contained. ”
“The image on the page was that of a human corpse. The body had been stripped naked, and its head had been twisted, facing completely backward. On the victim’s chest was a terrible burn. The man had been branded...imprinted with a single word.”
“The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”
“After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror.”
″‘I’d bow, but I might fall over,’ I say to Queen Elara, and immediately I wish I could call back the words. She’s a Silver, I can’t talk to her that way. She could put me in the stocks, take away my rations, punish me, punish my family. No, I realize in my growing horror. She’s the queen. She could just kill me. She could kill us all.”
“And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?”
It’s the art and the illustration that will actually creep you out. Like a damn nightmare you cannot come out of. They are gory. Not the black and white or blood red gory but gory.
This is a great story about parents not listening to their daughter and said daughter saving their home. It also has wolves...in the walls! It is just the kind of story that should be read aloud, too, full of the rhythms and repeated refrains that fit with oral story telling.
“I went closer. Flames still crept and licked at the blackened beams. There was no sign of my mother or my sisters. I tried to call out, but my tongue had suddenly become too big for my mouth, and the smoke was choking me and making my eyes stream. The whole village was on fire, but where was everyone?”
“I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which remained so fixed in my memory, and on which I had for so many years often ruminated with horror...”
“Thereupon we all touched glasses and drank. I am sure I wished no ill to King George; and if he had been there himself in proper person, it’s like he would have done as I did. No sooner had I taken out the drain than I felt hugely better, and could look on and listen, still a little mistily perhaps, but no longer with the same groundless horror and distress of mind.”
“I said nothing, nor so much as lifted my face. I had seen murder done, and a great, ruddy, jovial gentleman struck out of life in a moment; the pity of that sight was still sore within me, and yet that was but a part of my concern. Here was murder done upon the man Alan hated; here was Alan skulking in the trees and running from the troops; and whether his was the hand that fired or only the head that ordered, signified but little. By my way of it, my only friend in that wild country was blood-guilty in the first degree; I held him in horror; I could not look upon his face; I would have rather lain alone in the rain on my cold isle, than in that warm wood beside a murderer.”
Suspense builds slowly and creates an atmosphere of grim foreboding. However, Nathaniel is the only one of the young people whose personality is distinct, and the fantasy elements in the plot are not fully developed.
“There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead.”
“Now he moved to one side, and Cass gaped in astonishment...It was unlike anything he had ever seen. He instinctively drew back from the hole and something sharp bit deeply into his leg.”
“Because freak shows were terrible,” he said. “They pretended to be like proper circuses but they were cesspits of evil. Anybody who went to one would be just as bad as the people running it.”
“He suspected a lot was broken. His arm maybe as well as a rib or two. But my spine, my legs? His goos arm worked for him. It gave leverage to his back. There was pain, but not agony. Shift your legs. Try them. Go on, move. They muscles at first refused to co-operate. Am I paralysed?
“As the guest looked at the boy there appeared on his countenance amazement, then incredulity, and finally frozen horror. As the boy looked at the guest there appeared on his countenance amazement, then incredulity, and finally blank dejection.”
“If he could come into the world this day and see the things that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with horror? Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love!
Grete’s words had made her mother quite worried, she stepped to one side, saw the enormous brown patch against the flowers of the wallpaper, and before she even realised it was Gregor that she saw screamed: “Oh God, oh God!” Arms outstretched, she fell onto the couch as if she had given up everything and stayed there immobile.