Tag: 2024 Retrospectives Page 2 of 3

This is two months in a row where I’ve posted this in its closing days. I’m going to (try to) finish the May version this weekend. I know I’m the only one who cares, but it niggles at the back of my mind. There’s no theme this month, which is fine, but I enjoy it when one emerges. I’m babbling for the sake of babbling here it seems, like Skulguggery below I’ve lost track of this, so I’m just going to get on with things.

Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones Trilogy by Derek Landy

They both got out and opened the bonnet. “Well,” her mother said, looking at the engine, “at least that’s still there.”

“Do you know anything about engines?” Stephanie asked.

“That’s why I have a husband, so I don’t have to. Engines and shelves—that’s why man was invented.”

Stephanie made a mental note to learn about enginges before she turned eighteen. She wasn’t too fussed about the shelves.

“Am I going mad?”

“I hope not.”

“So you’re real, you actually exist?”

“Presumably.”

“You mean you’re not sure if you exist or not?”

“I’m fairly certain, I mean I could be wrong. I could be some ghastly hallucination, a figment of my imagination.”

“You might be a figment of your own imagination?”

“Stranger things have happened. And do, with alarming regularity.”

Every solution to every problem is simple. It’s the distance between the two where the mystery lies.

Her parents wanted her to find her own way in life. That’s what they’d said countless times in the past. Of course, they’d been referring to school subjects and college applications and job prospects. Presumably, at no stage did they factor living skeletons and magic underworlds into their considerations. If they had, their advice would probably have been very different.

“What does a clue look like?” Tanith whispered.

Stephanie fought the giggle down and whispered back. “I’m looking for a footprint or something.”

“Have you found one yet?”

“No. But that’s probably because I haven’t moved from this spot.”

“Maybe we should move, pretend we know what we’re doing.”

“Skulduggery,” the tall man said eventually, his voice deep and resonant, “trouble follows in your wake, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say follows,” Skulduggery answered. “It more kind of sits around and waits for me to get there.”

“I want you all to know, ” Skulduggery said, “that we are the first line of defense. In fact, we’re practically the only line of defense. If we fail, there won’t be a whole lot that anyone else will be able to do. what I’m trying to say, is that, failure at this point, isn’t really the smart move to make. We are not to fail—do I make myself absolutely clear? Failure is bad. It won’t help us in the short term, and certainly won’t do us any favors in the long run. And I think I’ve lost track of this speech, and I’m not too sure where it’s headed, but I know where it started and that’s what you’ve got to keep in mind.”

“Cheer up everyone, since we’re all going to die horribly anyway, what’s there to be worried about?”

“I’m placing you under arrest for murder, conspiracy to commit murder and, I don’t know, possibly littering.”

You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

…I’m beginning to realize I’ve never given grief the respect it deserves. Drawing no distinction between strong, weak, rich or poor, it plows through everyone’s lives the same, leaving identical mounds of emotional debris behind.

Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus

Hot dogs are the kind of American that you know there is something deeply wrong with but still find endearing.

Dietrich by Don Winslow

Big John was face down in a sphere of dried blood. Someone put two in the back of his head. “Natural causes?” Dietrich thinks, “you get two bullets in the head, naturally you’re going to die.”

They say that water is the most powerful erosive force in the world, it wears away rock, it cuts canyons. But sorrow, too, erodes. You see so much sadness on this job. it wears you down year after year, murder after murder, heartbreak after heartbreak. It washes away joy, carries it downstream like silt. But slowly, you don’t see it happening, you don’t really feel it, and then one day you wake up and you realize you no longer have the capacity for happines.

Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre- engaged servant of the long purse…

Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright?— I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature’s only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in the house, early and late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages; sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking; sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question…

A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

Spelunking Through Hell by Seanan McGuire

… when you’re already talking about people who have twenty-eight words for “wound” but only two for “friend,” you don’t want to deal with them when they get cranky.

The Botanist by M.W. Craven

‘I didn’t want you thinking I’d panicked. I didn’t want you thinking less of me.’

Poe was lost for words. ‘Why would I think less of you?’ he said eventually. ‘You’d just found your father’s corpse. There was a bullet hole in his head. If you can’t panic then, when can you?’

Poe had optimistically hoped that Stahl’s flat might be like a grease-spattered kettle — filthy on the outside but sparkling on the inside. He was wrong. if anything, the interior was worse than the exterior.

The discoloured carpet was littered with crushed beer cans, vodka bottles and containers from what looked like every takeaway in Plaistow. A teetering stack of empty pizza boxes reached for the tobacco-stained ceiling like a cardboard stalagmite. Scattered rodent droppings made it look as though someone had dropped a packet of raisins.

And the smell … It was somehow both cloyingly sweet and acrid. Although Poe could smell vomit, urine and faeces, the overriding smell was stale alcohol. It seemed Stahl had hit rock bottom, then taken the elevator down a few more floors.

Poe’s eyes began to sting. Flynn put a tissue over her mouth and nose, didn’t even try to hide her disgust.

‘It’s the maid’s week off,’ Stahl said.

Douglas Salt was too tall for his build. If he’d been four inches shorter he might have got away with it, but at six-foot-five he just looked weird, like he’d been put through a pasta machine. He had compensated as best he could. His face was tanned and symmetrical and his teeth were whiter than snow. Poe suspected his tan came out of a bottle, surgeons had sculptured his face, and his teeth had been bleached until they were down to the quick. His hair was ordered and neat. He wore cream chinos, a polo shirt and, despite being indoors and in his own home, he had a pink jumper slung over his shoulders. For some reason, he reminded Poe of American cheese.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)

What better day than the last day of April to finish my March wrap-up?

The Blight of Blackwings by Kevin Herne

I waved at Constable du Bartylyn, who was passing by and had absolutely no updates on my stolen furniture, save for a speculation that someone else must have farted on it by now, and if I thought about that long enough, it might make me feel a little bit better about never seeing it again.

He walked away, whistling, and I thought he was a singularly strange individual for trying to comfort me with thoughts of thieves tooting their foghorns on my property. But perhaps I should give him full Marks for innovative community policing.

“Have you ever heard of the lizards in Forn that can change the color of their skin to match their surroundings? They’re called chameleons.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of them. I’d love to actually see one someday.”

After witnessing that performance, I think grief can be thought of as a chameleon. It can change its color or pattern, but underneath it all it’s still an ugly lizard on a branch, waiting patiently for the right time to strike.”

“You realize that every time I’m sad from now on I’m going to think chameleons?”

A mob is not the best, though. It’s strange to be in one, to realize that, Hey, I’m part of a mob right now, and mobs are pretty famous for not doing anything nice to other people. No one sees a mob tearing down the street and thinks, Oh, neat! I wonder what kindness they will bestow upon our neighbors! No one wishes a mob would form outside their neighborhood.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

It’s odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy’s mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.

I normally can’t stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.

…I looked out the window and felt old. It was a feeling I’d had a lot lately. But not in a rueful way. If this is how twenty-somethings spent their twenties these days, they could have their twenties. Their thirties, too.

Dead Ground by MW. Craven

Poe had missed something. he didn’t know what, but his second brain, the one that ticked over in the background while his primary brain made rash decisions was working overtime. He recognized the signs, nervous energy and an inability to concentrate on anything.

Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs

“The thing that we thought might end up with Adam dead looks like it will work out okay,” I told her dryly as her feet hit the ground again. “We have another situation to replace it that might end up with Adam dead. Or me dead. Or maybe the whole pack. But at least we solved one deadly situation before we picked up another one.”

“Business as usual,” said Tad.

Heaven’s River by Dennis E. Taylor

All actions have risks. Most inactions even more so.

What it lacks in elegance, it makes up for with wads of unearned optimism. Let’s do it.

Sadly, it was like most political arguments. No one was willing to debate their base assumptions, or justify them, or compromise on them. The simple tactic being that if you repeated your assertion often enough, with enough emotion and volume, the opponents would somehow be forced to see things your way.

Podkin One-Ear by Kieran Larwood

“Stories belong to the teller,” says the bard. “At least half of them do. The other part belongs to the listeners. When a good story is told to a good listener, the pair of them own it together.”

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)