Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?

No,' Ben says, 'but I believe it. I believe it for you. And that's why it's hope.

And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.

Superior numbers versus superior firepower. A recipe for unending slaughter.

You went up a girl and came down a woman.

And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.