"I want you to know that I think you're right. The world does seem like a terrible place right now. But I'm going to tell you something because I think you need to hear it: you've become a very negative person. And I don't know if it has to do with me and your father, or if it's the other kids in...
"In the twilight of a childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St Vitus' Hospital for the Mentally Ill to d...
What an astonishingly beautiful, awful, brutal, stunning book. Who are the players? Well, there's eleven-year-old Dough and his thirteen-year-old pyro brother Pill-Bug. (Their dad, who's dead, was familiar with Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue" theory.) They live in a trailer park with their mom and ...
A young ex-con in a small Illinois town. A lonely giant with a haunted past. A beautiful girl with a troubled heart. Strange and darkly magical, How the Hula Girl Sings begins exactly where most pulp fiction usually ends, with the vivid episode of the terrible crime itself. Three years later, Luc...
but knowing and then not knowing that what she was seeing was the unchangeable, irredeemable depiction of her own fate.* * *Between the grandfather and the grandson rode the dull-eyed kid from the pet store, sweating, eyes blinking out tears. Quentin was behind the wheel, minding the road, afraid...
had the AC/DC cranked up, as he tried like hell to get his van to start. I was watching, sitting on the hood of an outof-commission Chevy, its black-and-chrome nose peeking out from under the dusty beige tarp. It was around eight at night, still real warm, Indian-type summer and all, but getting ...
THAT SAME NIGHT. They get two cups of coffee at a small diner on Chicago Avenue and begin to plan their violent art movement together. It will be called the Art Terrorists. Or the Art Brutes. Or maybe just the Anti-Rationalists. And they discuss these names, straightfaced,...