Tag: 2024 Retrospectives Page 3 of 4

Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs

He was so in love with Mary Jo it made me feel like songs should start spontaneously playing anytime they were together.

The Last King of California by Jordan Harper

Murder is a type of magic. It has powers so a single person killed with intention can haunt the world more than a million lives ended by car crashes or cancer.

Again he has that feeling like he’s standing with his toes poking over the edge of this flat earth. He thinks on something he read in a novel in Intro to World Lit, before he quit going to class altogether. About how when you peek over the side of a cliff and get that swooshing feeling in your belly, that it isn’t a fear of falling. In fact, the book said, it is the opposite. Vertigo is the fight in your mind between the part that wants to save you and the part that wants to fall.

[She] takes shallow breaths to deal with the smell. [His]’s place doesn’t smell like death. Death doesn’t smell like anything. It’s the hungry slime of life that stinks.

Life grabs you in its jaws like a bear and all the flailing around and the screaming you do while it eats you, that’s what we call free will. Like the bear’s not there, like all this wailing and fury and fucking up everything is just what we choose to do.

Then maybe once or twice in a life you see someone flip loose from the bear’s mouth altogether and walk free through the world, and it scares the hell out of you.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

“Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.”

Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my concentration.

So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.

So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me.

The Camelot Shadow by Sean Gibson

He raised his eyes to the window to watch as snowflakes fell from the sky with a nonchalance that seemed defiantly at odds with their short lifespans.

“I understand you are a highly regarded scholar.”

“I suppose you might say that I know quite a lot about very little of consequence.”

Fridays are very agreeable days, perhaps owing to their position in the week. Whatever the reason, I find them very accommodating, days that one can depend upon to provide succor no matter what ignominious events Tuesdays and those dastardly Thursdays have wrought.

He was a trim man of average height whose lips curled in a perpetual smirk, one that indicated both his willingness to be amused by life and his expectation that life do something to reward that willingness.

“If wits are to be our primary weapon, I fear that we may be bringing a metaphorical bayonet to a gunfight.”

“I would have said an olive fork.”

“I’m not very good at not knowing what I can’t do.”

Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

Days of death are days when we weigh our relationship with love in our bare hands. Days when we remember what has gone, and fear what is to come. The joy love brings, and the price we pay. When we give thanks but also pray for mercy.

Swiped by L.M. Chilton

But just as I was about to close the app, an emoji popped up on the screen.

Of course, it was the fucking winky face, my least favorite of all the emojis, the text equivalent of yelling, “Not!” after a sentence.

I always thought that Sarah had an overly-romanticized view of marriage. Her parents had the sort of relationship you only see in Richard Curtis movies–dedicated, loving, and solid as a rock. She’d grown up in a gorgeous and massive cottage in Haywoods-Heath, surrounded by idyllic countryside, and while she didn’t technically own a pony–I was pretty sure that she hung out with one on a regular basis.It was classic British rom-com territory, so no wonder she always dreamed of a bumbling English fop to sweep her off her feet.

I was so angry at the world I just wanted to shut everything away. His manic pixie dream girl had curled into a pangolin of grief, and I couldn’t blame him for slowly backing off.

(“pangolin of grief” might be the best phrase I read this month)

A Study In Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

“Well, I for one, thought your hypothesis was remarkably elegant. It really is too bad that sometimes inconvenient facts surface to thumb their noses at remarkably elegant hypotheses.”

“Poo to inconvenient facts.”

This Is Who We Are Now by James Bailey

I’m struck by how much thinner his hair is than last summer, when it was thinner than the time before. It disappears in half lives, always tending toward complete baldness but never quite getting there.

Danny drives the way he does everything else. Overconfidently.

Midnight Riot/Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body The London-Once-Over, a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy, or a human being in distgress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why Good Samaritan in London is considered an Extreme Sport, like base jumping or crocodile wrestling.

If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news, so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them—such people are not to be trusted.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)

June slipped away without me taking care of May. So, it’s time for a little catchup.

Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

If it’s possible to blush all the way down to your DNA, I did it.

It felt very much like home all of a sudden, like a familiar book released in a new edition.

Chasing Empty Caskets by E.N. Crane

“Winnie, seek,” I said, letting her lead me. She was following the boy’s scent back the way he came and I followed her, grudgingly taking the sticky hand. It was small and somehow both wet and freezing. Children were a terrifying medical anomaly, and I suddenly understood why the ladies in mommy groups were nuts.

The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher

Bayard is a born hero, which is the larval form of a dead hero.

Ransom shook her head. “Some people think that if they’re simply insane and ruthless enough, they can accomplish anything.”

“Terrifying,” Espira said.

“Oh, that’s not the terrifying part,” Calliope said.

“No?”

“The terrifying part,” she murmured, “is that sometimes they’re right.”

Bridget rather forgot how to be conscious for some indistinct length of time.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

You may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

Grave Cold by Shannon Knight

They’d reached her truck. “Nyle, meet the Gremlin, a machine you will love to hate.” The yellow truck looked very much up to the task.

One’s own mortality was a mighty incentive.

Backpacking Through Bedlam by Seanan McGuire

Family is complicated. Peach cobbler, on the other hand, is refreshingly simple.

“The laws of physics aren’t negotiable.”

Darius laughed, and the sound was loud and joyous as he set his hands back on the wheel. “Sure they are. There’s no law that’s not negotiable, if you know how to get your shoulder against it and push.”

Always be polite to she shapeshifting super predator. It’s a simple rule of life, but a good one all the same.

Dark Days by Derek Landy

“Sometimes you’ve got to admit it when you’re wrong.”

“You never admit it when you’re wrong.”

“But I’m rarely wrong, you see. You, on the other hand, are wrong a bizzarly large amount of the time. Statistically, it’s quite amazing.”

The Ink Black Heart by Author

He was starting to feel like a truffle pig doing its job in a room full of incense, dead fish, and strong cheese.

First Frost by Author

I’d taken the frontage road, but I think I might’ve accidentally taken a few other turns, and now here we were in what might be the middle of nowhere—and when a guy from Wyoming refers to a place as the middle of nowhere that truly means the epicenter of nowhere.

I said nothing, which, when there was a stenographer in the room, was always a safe bet.

Paper & Blood by Kevin Hearne

Grief is never easy. But it gets softer around the edges, smoothed over like a river rock given time enough and water. It’s still a rock and it’s heavy and dangerous and capable of hurting you. Just not immediately to the touch, if that makes sense.

When the sky slid from indigo to grey, heralding the dawn, the birds began to wake up and call about their urgent need for Wednesday coffee— or so I imagined. I certainly needed some, as a belligerent caffeine-withdrawal headache had taken up residence in my brain and likely had legal arguments against eviction.

From pulp—utterly lifeless pulp—new life can be born. Add water and pressure and you no longer have mere pulp but a medium for the miraculous. It can carry the words of one lover to another. Express gratitude for gifts and thoughts. Invoice a client. Threaten death. Bear the light touch of poetry or the weighty prose of novels. It can be folded into an airplane, to annoy your teacher, or folded into origami, an artistic appreciation of nature made from wholesome natural ingredients. And on and on. So much can be built from the ruin of plant life.

Which is not to say that humans are noble. We ruin so much else that never gets a new life, and their dissolution—their extinction—is final.

But paper is one thing we got right.

The best we can do sometimes, in absence of actual wisdom, is to simply cease being foolish.

Howl by e rathke

To look back on that day is to sink into a delicate memory. Like a love letter sent to myself, yet left to pulp in the rain.

The Bitter Past by Bruce Borgos

I believe in hunches. I think they’re just the dots in your brain that aren’t fully connected yet.

Erasure by Percival Everett

There are as many hammers as there are saws, the misplaced thumb knows no difference.

A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

I was lonely, angrier than I had been in a long time, angrier than when I was an angry youth, but now I was rich and angry. I realized how much easier it was to be angry when one is rich.

What some people would have you believe is that Duchamp demonstrated that art could be made out of anything, that there is nothing special about an object d’art that makes it what it is, that all that matters is that we are willing to allow it to be art. To say, “this is a work of art” is a strange kind of performative utterance as when the king knights a fellow or the judge pronounces a couple man and wife. But if it turns out that the marriage license was incorrectly filled out, then the declaration is undone and we will say, “I guess you’re not husband and wife after all.” But even as it’s thrown out of the museum, what has been called art it is still art. Discarded art. Shunned art. Bad art. Misunderstood art. Oppressed art. Shocked art. Lost art. Dead art. Art before its time. Artless art. But art nonetheless.

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

“I like land,” I said. “I don’t drown there.”

“Any dietary restrictions?”

“I tried being a vegan for a while, but I couldn’t live without cheese.”

“They have vegan cheese.”

“No, they don’t. They have shredded orange and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”

“That thing looks like H. P. Lovecraft’s panic attack.”

It was stupidly perfect how all my problems were suddenly solved with the strategic application of money.

Detours and Do-overs by Wesley Parker

Since she doesn’t wanna talk, I do what I assume most men do when confronted with crippling silence from their significant other.

I start to rationalize shit.

“How you holding up?” she says.

“Like a Jenga tower in the middle of a bunch of drunks,”

Grammar Sex and Other Stuff by Robert Germaux

Don’t you just love it when a professional athlete ends a long holdout and finally signs that new deal worth multiple millions of dollars, but assures everyone that “it wasn’t about the money”? Bless his little heart. As if any reference to cold hard cash would have somehow sullied the whole salary negotiation process.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)

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)