The Waking Dark is about what happens when something awakens a towns darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.

Don't go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.

The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the Law is an ability to change it.

But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. “Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.