Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me

I believe in evil, but all my life I've gone back and forth about whether or not there's an outside evil, whether or not there's a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.

The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it.

They say that loving eyes can never see, but that's a fool's axiom. Sometimes, they see too much

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.