I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?