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f88cc60
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He curled up, twitching and spasming, the pain stormtrooping through his entire body in agonizing, dizzying, pounding waves. He vomited, but it wasn't the contents of his stomach. It his stomach, hanging inside-out from a slimy loop of esophagus, spilling out the precious blood he'd been digesting. Even with everything going on, the smell of blood activated his biting reflex, and he chomped down on his own regurgitated organs, screaming..
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horror
real-vampires
vampires
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Blake Crouch |
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6dffd32
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We perceive our environment in three dimensions, but we don't actually live in a 3-D world. 3-D is static. A snapshot. We have to add a fourth dimension to begin to describe the nature of our existence. The 4-D tesseract doesn't add a spatial dimension. It adds a temporal one. It adds time, a stream of 3-D cubes, representing space as it moves along time's arrow. This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brill..
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Blake Crouch |
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deda3e1
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Like standing on a beach as the tide sucks the sand beneath my feet back out to sea, I can feel my native world, and the reality that supports it, pulling away. I wonder: If I don't fight hard enough against it, will this reality slowly click in and carry me off?
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Blake Crouch |
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4a59536
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In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies.
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Blake Crouch |
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201dd79
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So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what's around the next bend. And isn't that, in the end, what drives us?
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Blake Crouch |
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1eed831
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There was simply nothing in his experience that even compared with the thrill of killing to protect his family. In this moment, it was the purpose of his existence. He felt, possibly for the first time in his life, like a fucking man.
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Blake Crouch |
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40160ef
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He thinks perhaps there's a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.
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memory
sci-fi
science-fiction
time
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Blake Crouch |
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b49173a
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How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?
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Blake Crouch |
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730df2d
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But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover--memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.
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Blake Crouch |
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ceef331
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Most astrophysicists believe that the force holding stars and galaxies together--the thing that makes our whole universe work--comes from a theoretical substance we can't measure or observe directly. Something they call dark matter. And this dark matter makes up most of the known universe.
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Blake Crouch |
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583480a
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All your life you're told you're unique. An individual. That no one on the planet is just like you. It's humanity's anthem. But that isn't true for me anymore.
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Blake Crouch |
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2ebaa2b
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Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the mule skinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer's mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the rock crushers pulverizing ore. The sound of the stamps in operation is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop them--Christma..
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Blake Crouch |
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bda738e
|
We leave this life the same way that we enter it, totally alone, bereft.
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children
love
marriage
parallel-universes
science
thriller
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Blake Crouch |
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41a848b
|
Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.
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Blake Crouch |
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2a7229d
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When every memory contains a universe, what does simple even mean?
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Blake Crouch |
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f19eb6b
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Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in, or walling out.' Robert Frost wrote that.
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Blake Crouch |
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3ca911f
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He watched the stars go dark as the sun breathed fire into the sky, and when it finally cleared the ridge on the far side of the river, he bathed in the rays of gorgeous warmth streaming into his alcove and toasting the frozen stone.
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Blake Crouch |
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d7e93c2
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I check the time on my drug-dealer flip phone, the one I bought to call Daniela in another Chicago. It won't make calls in this world---I guess minutes aren't transferable across the multiverse.
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Blake Crouch |
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be2cd05
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A villager in Ca Lu said it to me, before I removed his intestines with a bayonet." "Was he talking about himself?" Donaldson asked. "Or you?" "You tell me. Did you feel alive when you killed your father, Donaldson?" Donaldson nodded. "And when you killed the owner of the Pinto?" Mr. K continued. "Goddamn piece of crap car. I wish I could kill that guy again." "How about someone else in his place?" Donaldson squinted at Mr. K. "What do you ..
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Blake Crouch |
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bfb7dfd
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Like the first day of any new thing, it has been a long one, and he's glad to see it end.
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Blake Crouch |
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caecc6f
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They haven't been unhappy these last few years, quite the opposite. But it's been a long, long time since she felt that sense of giddy love that effervesces in the pit of your stomach and spectacularly upends the world.
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Blake Crouch |
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d3ee4a4
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Wish we lived in a world where actions were measured by the intentions behind them. But the truth is, they're measured by their consequences.
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Blake Crouch |
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d219b3f
|
When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life, of our existence and purpose, becomes lost.
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Blake Crouch |
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424536b
|
She has a direct link hardwired from her heart to her mouth. No filter, no self-revision. She says what she feels, without a shred of guile or cunning. She works no angles.
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Blake Crouch |
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422da9f
|
Aren't we both lost in worlds that, for reasons beyond our control, no longer align with our identity?
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Blake Crouch |
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1ee044e
|
The worst moments of your life you never see coming.
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Blake Crouch |
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d6c9c4d
|
Even right now, it's like I'm seeing you for the first time, and I have this nervous ache in my stomach. I think about you every second. I think about all the choices we've made that created this moment. Us sitting here together at this beautiful table. Then I think of all the possible events that could have stopped this moment from ever happening, and it all feels, I don't know..." "What?" "So fragile." Now he becomes thoughtful for a mome..
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Blake Crouch |
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8b7ce89
|
I have good intentions, but... But what? But all the time I fail. I hurt the ones I love.
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Blake Crouch |
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e856b37
|
She took me in when I was lost. When the world stopped making sense.
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Blake Crouch |
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2258ab3
|
You are one ugly motherfucker." Ethan chuckled. "Sorry. I couldn't resist. It's from a movie. Seriously, what the hell are you?"
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Blake Crouch |
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d053495
|
Sorry." The shard clinked."
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Blake Crouch |
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0b166ed
|
The sting and the shame of all he's put her through are still raw. He can't say for certain, but he suspects that if she'd done the same to him, he'd already be gone.
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Blake Crouch |
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f873d98
|
He dismounts his albino steed, the horse's pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice.
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Blake Crouch |
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abc5ee4
|
If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. GIST)
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phd-cell-biolo
|
Blake Crouch |
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17b8744
|
Do you know how a gun works?" "They hurt you." "They can. I shot a bullet into the back of Molly's head so she wouldn't be sick or sad anymore." "Did it hurt her?"
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Blake Crouch |
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22d1612
|
In the world we came from, our existence was so easy. And so full of discontent because it was so easy. How do you find meaning when you're one of seven billion? When food, clothing, everything you need is just one Walmart away? When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life.
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Blake Crouch |
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aa7602b
|
adrenaline-fueled nightmare, which moved so fast I had to hold onto the book with both hands. But underneath all that intensity beat the heart of a damn fine writer. Someone who could turn a phrase, slip in some subtext, make the reader really care. Desert Places will give you nightmares. But it will also move you in ways you didn't expect. How much do I admire his
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Blake Crouch |
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edb9dd1
|
There are no rights anymore. No laws. Just force and fear.
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Blake Crouch |
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fa841d7
|
No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes to you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.
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Blake Crouch |
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d9eccf7
|
Fifteen years ago, before we met, Daniela was a comer to Chicago's art scene. She had a studio in Bucktown, showed her work in half-dozen galleries, and had just lined up her first solo exhibition in New York. Then came life. Me. Charlie. A bout of crippling postpartum depression. Derailment. Now she teaches private art lessons to middle-grade students.
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Blake Crouch |
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9f37261
|
It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches into a new world.
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Blake Crouch |
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a560bbd
|
Knew she didn't need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.
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Blake Crouch |
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db0a6bd
|
Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works.
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Blake Crouch |
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ed145e9
|
In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies. I would think a former employee of the federal government could grasp that concept.
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Blake Crouch |