By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.

Time's the thief of memory