“Aaron met him in New Jersey, coming back from his twice-annual visit to his sister’s in Cherry Hill, and within twenty minutes he’d asked Max to come home—to live.”

“In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door…”

“…my parents’ divorce agreement, a tarot deck, an armadillo that sang a funny song when you squeezed its belly…”

“Much of this is simply a lifelong tendency on my part to notice where the crowd is running and then run in the opposite direction.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

“The victim is not the person who wakes
in the middle of the night. The victim is not
the person who sleeps until noon.”

Despite some dapper pretension, there is a basic ridiculousness in "the person of letters" making the rounds on a game show, which, in theory, ought to be a real dignity-leech. Most of these authors seem amused to be on television, as if they can't believe that a network executive signed off on such a thing.

Shortly before I started reading my favorite novel of 2019, my beautiful 23 year old daughter stopped communicating with me. I didn’t know it then, but it would be almost a year before I saw her again.

My love affair with monsters can be traced to my eccentric childhood, of course.