Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!

Terrifying. . . . A Dark Matter is populated with vivid, sympathetic characters, and driven by terrors both human and supernatural. It's the kind of book that's impossible to put down once it has been picked up. It kept me reading far into the night. Straub builds otherworldly terror without ever losing touch with his attractive cast of youngsters, who age beautifully. Put this one high on your list.

And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.